all invaders when they applied it to these unwarlike visitors. Yet the Quakers were in a sense invaders, nevertheless; their latest and ablest defender, Mr. R. C. Hallowell, concedes as much when he entitles his history "The Quaker Invasion of New England;" and if an invasion it was, then Cotton Mather's argumentum ad hominem was quite to the point. Had the Quakers, like the Moravians, made settlements and cleared the forests for themselves, this argument would have been quite disarmed; and had those settlements been interfered with by the Puritans, the injustice would have been far more glaring; nor is it probable that the Puritans would have molested such. colonies-unless they happened to be too near.

It must be remembered, too, that the Puritans did not view Quakers and other zealots as heretics merely, but as dangerous. social outlaws. There was among the colonists a genuine and natural fear that if the tide of extravagant fanaticism once set in, it might culminate in such atrocities as had shocked all Europe while the Anabaptists, under John of Leyden, were in power at Münster. In the frenzied and naked exhibitions of Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson they saw tendencies which might end in uprooting all the social order for which they were striving, and might lead at last to the revocation of their charter. I differ with the greatest unwillingness from my old friend Mr. John G. Whittier in his explanation of a part of these excesses. He thinks that these naked performances came from persons who were maddened by seeing the partial exposure of Quakers whipped through the streets. This view, though plausible, seems to me to overlook the highly wrought condition of mind among these enthusiasts, and the fact that they regarded everything as a symbol. When one of the very ablest of the Quakers, Robert Barclay, walked the streets of Aberdeen in sackcloth and ashes, he deemed it right to sacrifice all propriety for the sake of a symbolic act; and in just the same spirit we find the Quaker writers of that period de

fending these personal exposures, not by Mr. Whittier's reasons, but for symbolic ones. In Southey's "CommonplaceBook" there is a long extract, to precisely this effect, from the life of Thomas Story, an English Friend who had travelled in

America. He seems to have been a moderate man, and to have condemned some of the extravagances of the Ranters, but gravely argues that the Quakers might really have been commanded by God to exhibit their nakedness "as a sign."

Whatever provocation the Friends may have given, their persecution is the darkest blot upon the history of the timedarker than witchcraft, which was a disease of supernatural terror. And like the belief in witchcraft, the spirit of persecution could only be palliated by the general delusion of the age, by the cruelty of the English legislation against the Jesuits, which the Puritan Legislature closely followed as regarded Quakers; and in general by the attempt to unite Church and State, and to take the Old Testament for a literal modern statute-book. It must be remembered that our horror at this intolerance is also stimulated from time to time by certain extravagant fabrications which still appear as genuine in the newspapers; as that imaginary letter said to have been addressed by Cotton Mather to a Salem clergyman in 1682, and proposing that a colony of Quakers be arrested and sold as slaves. This absurd forgery appeared first in some Pennsylvania newspaper, accompanied by the assertion that this letter was in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. No such paper was ever known to that society; Cotton Mather was, at the time alleged, but nineteen years old, and the Quaker persecution had substantially ceased twenty years before. But when did such contradictions ever have any effect on the vitality of a lie?

The dark and intense convictions of Puritanism were seen at their highest in the witchcraft trials-events which took place in almost every colony at different times. The wonder is that they showed themselves so much less in America than in most European nations at the same period. To see this delusion in its most frightful form we must go beyond the Atlantic and far beyond the limits of English Puritanism. During

its course 30,000 victims were put to death in Great Britain, 75,000 in France, 100,000 in Germany, besides those executed in Italy, Switzerland, and Sweden, many of them being burned. Compared with this vast estimate, which I take from that careful historian Mr. W. F. Poole, how trivial seem the few dozen cases to be found in our early colonies; and yet, as he justly remarks, these few have attracted more attention from the world than all the rest. Howell, the letter - writer, says, under date of February 22, 1647: "Within the compass of two years near upon 300 witches were arraigned, and the larger part of them executed, in Essex and Suffolk [England] only. Scotland swarms with them more and more, and persons of good quality are executed daily." In a single Swedish village threescore and ten witches were discovered, most of whom, including fifteen children, were executed, besides thirty children who were compelled to "run the gantlet" and be lashed on their hands once a week for a year. The eminent English judge Sir Matthew Hale, giving his charge at the trial for witchcraft of Rose Cullender and Anne Duny in 1668—a trial which had great weight with the American judges-said that he "made no doubt there were such Creatures as Witches, for the Scriptures affirmed it, and the Wisdom of all Nations had provided Laws against such Persons." The devout Bishop Hall wrote in England: "Satan's prevalency in this Age is most clear, in the marvellous numbers of Witches abiding in all places. Now hundreds are discovered in one Shire." It shows that there was, on the whole, a healthy influence exerted on Puritanism by American life when we consider that the witchcraft excitement was here so limited and so short-lived.

The first recorded case of execution for this offence in the colonies is mentioned in Winthrop's journal (March, 1646-47), as occurring at Hartford, Connecticut, where another occurred. in 1648, there being also one in Boston that same year. Ninemore took place in Boston and in Connecticut before the great

outbreak at Salem. A curious one appears in the Maryland records of 1654 as having happened on the high seas upon a vessel bound to Baltimore, where a woman was hanged by the seamen upon this charge, the case being afterwards investigated by the Governor and Council.

A woman was tried and acquitted in Pennsylvania in 1683; one was hanged in Maryland for this alleged crime by due sentence of court in 1685; and one or two cases occurred at New York. The excitement finally came to a head in 1692 at Salem, Massachusetts, where nineteen persons were hanged, and one "pressed to death" for refusing to testify-this being the regularly ordained punishment for such refusal. The excitement being thus relieved, a reaction followed. Brave old Samuel Sewall won for himself honor in all coming time by rising in his place in the congregation, and causing to be read an expression of regret for the part he had taken in the trials. The reaction did not at once reach the Southern colonies. Grace Sherwood was legally ducked for witchcraft in Virginia in 1705, and there was an indictment, followed by acquittal, in Maryland as late as 1712.

SAMUEL SEWALL.

That the delusion reached this point was due to no hardened inhumanity of feeling; on the contrary, those who participated in it prayed to be delivered from any such emotion. "If a drop of innocent blood should be shed in the prosecution of the witchcrafts among us, how unhappy are we!" wrote Cotton