Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/342

 and if the terrible delusion of 1692 has taught our magistrates and rulers caution and temperate judgment—if the sacred fear of taking human life even from the worst of criminals which pervades our jury-boxes, and has sometimes been regarded as almost pusillanimity, has sprung from a remembrance of the terrible era when the judgment of the whole community—legal, ecclesiastical, and secular—swerved aside and was bent like a reed before the breath of passion and superstition, the annals of "Salem Witchcraft" have not been preserved in vain.

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