and to refuse belief to this or that specific case of diabolical possession. An out-and-out denial of the theoretical possibility of witchcraft was quite a different matter. Most people were inclined to think that there had been witches "in old times," — at all events, " in Bible times "; and nobody felt quite sure when compacts with the devil had become obsolete. Rationalism itself often turned pale at specific phenomena, as indeed it sometimes does to-day.

Reckless denouncers of New England for the witchcraft delusion of the seventeenth century forget many things or never knew them. The wonder is, not that such an outbreak should have taken place, but that it should have come to an end so soon. The attack was as short as it was sharp; and its sharpness was by no means extraordinary when compared with the violence with which the disorder raged in other parts of the world. Few persons have the time or the inclination to explore the gloomy literature of demonology; but it is not too much to ask of the historical student, or even of the general reader, that before he passes judgment on his ancestors in so weighty a matter, he should make an attempt to put himself in contact with the history of European thought and with the general state of opinion in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. One can at least read the witch stories in the supplement to the Antidote against Atheism of Dr. Henry More, the famous Cambridge Platonist, and in the Triumph over the Sadducees1 of Dr. Joseph Glanvil, who was chaplain in ordinary to King Charles II, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the author of a celebrated treatise on the Vanity of Dogmatizing. Glanvil's witch-book appeared in a fourth edition as late as 1726, and was thought to have demolished the arguments of the doubters.

A little reading of this kind is a good corrective spice,

1 Sadducismus Triumphatus is the title, but the book is in English. It was first published in 1681.

as Lord Bacon would have called it. Our whole difficulty in estimating the significance of the troubles at Salem comes from lack of perspective. They make a great noise in the annals of New England, and we find it hard not to think of them as something monstrous or abnormal. But they were neither. Deplorable as the witchcraft persecution was, it should not be treated hysterically or as if it were an isolated phenomenon. Here were the New Englanders settled on the edge of the wilderness and in daily contact with a savage race whom all the world believed to be worshippers of Satan. They had brought from England the same beliefs in the intervention of the devil in human affairs that everybody held, and they had seen no occasion to modify them. Nor had their countrymen who remained at home in England suffered any change of heart. Is it reasonable to demand from the New Englanders, lay or clerical, exposed as they were to peculiar terrors in a wild country, a degree of calm rationality which was not found among their contemporaries in England "who sat at home at ease"?

There is nothing strange, then, in the outbreak of witchcraft persecution in Massachusetts. It was inconceivable that the Colony should pass through its first century without such a calamity. The wonderful thing is that it did not come sooner and last longer. From the first pranks of Mr. Parris's unhappy children (in February, 1692) to the collapse of the prosecution in January, 1693, was less than a year. During the interval twenty persons had suffered death, and two are known to have died in jail. If to these we add a few sporadic cases, there is a total of between twenty-five and thirty victims; but this is the whole reckoning, not merely for a year or two but for a complete century. The concentration of the troubles in Massa

1 C. W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, Boston, 1867, II, 351.

chusetts within the limits of a single year has given a wrong turn to the thoughts of many writers. This concentration. makes the case more conspicuous, but it does not make it worse. On the contrary, it makes it better. It is astonishing that there should have been less than half a dozen executions for witchcraft in Massachusetts before 1692, and equally astonishing that the delusion, when it became acute, should have raged for but a year, and that but twenty persons should have been executed. The facts are distinctly creditable to our ancestors, - to their moderation and to the rapidity with which their good sense could reassert itself after a brief eclipse.

No one has ever made an accurate count of the executions for witchcraft in England in the seventeenth century, but they must have mounted into the hundreds.1 Matthew Hopkins, the infamous "witch-finder general," is thought to have brought sixty persons to the gallows in Suffolk in 1645 and 1646; by his efforts fifteen were hanged in Essex in 1645 and sixteen at Yarmouth the year before. His confederate Stern puts the sum total of Hopkins's victims at two hundred.2 In Scotland, where there was no Hopkins, the number was much greater than in England. On the continent of Europe many thousands suffered death in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nicholas Remy (Remigius) of Lorraine gathered the materials for his work on the "Worship of Demons," published in 1595,3 from the trials of some nine hundred persons whom he had sentenced to death in the fifteen years preceding. The efforts of the Bishop of Bamberg from 1622 to 1633 resulted in six hundred executions, the Bishop of Würzburg, in about the same period, is said to have put nine hundred persons 1 See Hutchinson, Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, 2d ed., London, 1720, pp. 45 ff.

2 Lives of Twelve Bad Men, edited by Thomas Seccombe, London, 1894, p. 64.

8 Dæmonolatreia, Lugduni, 1595.

to death. These figures, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely, help us to regard the Salem Witchcraft in its true proportions, as a very small incident in the history of a terrible superstition.

The last execution for witchcraft in Massachusetts took place in 1693, as we have seen; indeed, twenty of the total of about twenty-five cases fall within that and the preceding year. There were no witch trials in New England in the eighteenth century. The annals of Europe are not so clear. In England Jane Wenham was condemned to death for this imaginary crime in 1712, but she was pardoned. The act against witchcraft was repealed in 1736, but in 1751 Ruth Osborne, a reputed witch, was killed by a mob in Hertfordshire. The last execution for witchcraft in Germany took place in 1775. In Spain the last witch was burned to death in 1781. In Switzerland Anna Göldi was beheaded in 1782 for bewitching the child of her master, a physician. In Poland two women were burned as late as 1793.5 Just before the arrest of Jane Wenham, Addison, in the Spectator for July 11, 1711, had expressed the creed of a well-bred and sensible man of the world: "I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any particular Instance of it." And with this significant utterance we may close our brief discussion of a subject that has been much misunderstood and return to our toads.

The toad is a distinguished figure both in literature and in popular superstition or folk-lore, and he owes his fame

1 Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, ed. Heppe, Stuttgart, 1880, II, 38 ff.

2 See the extraordinary enumeration in Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels, Leipzig, 1869, II, 293 ff.

3 Thomas Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, London, 1851, II, 319 ff.

4 The same, II, 326 ff.

5 Soldan, II, 314, 322, 327.