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Rh of all English-speaking races, will have special advantages. The first settlers of New England brought across the Atlantic the sentiments which had been formed in their minds in Great Britain and on the Continent, as well as the tendencies which were the common heritage of such an ancestry. They were a very religious and also credulous people; having few books, no papers, little news, and virtually no science; removed by thousands of miles and months of time from Old World civilization; living in the midst of an untamed wilderness, contending against a climate unlike anything they had experienced, surrounded by Indians whom they believed to be under the control of the devil, and whose medicine-men and soothsayers they accounted wizards. Such mental and moral soil was adapted to the growth of witchcraft, and to create an invincible determination to inflict the punishments pronounced against it in the Old Testament; but the coöperation of various exciting causes was necessary to a general agitation and a real epidemic.

Samuel G. Drake's "Annals of Witchcraft in New England and Elsewhere in the United States, from their first Settlement," which is here epitomized, enables us to trace the sporadic manifestations of witchcraft step by step to the fearful explosion of 1692. The Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620. In 1636 they included in the summary of offenses "lyable to death," "the solemn compaction or conversing with the Divell by the way of Witchcraft, conjuration, or the like." The colony of Massachusetts adopted the Body of Liberties, which contains a similar clause. In 1642 Connecticut included this in its Capital Code: "Yf any Man or Woman be a witch, that is, hath or conforteth with a Familiar Spirit, they hall be put to death."