Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/158

122 clergyman, eighty years old, who was executed for witchcraft.

In the reign of Queen Anne the rural population still believed in witchcraft. Addison tells how he and Sir Roger de Coverley visited Moll White and found a broomstick and a cat. Sir Roger said that Moll had often been brought before him for making children spit pins and giving maids the nightmare, and "that the country people would be tossing her into a pond and trying experiments with her every day if it was not for him and his chaplain." Several witches were executed during the reign of Anne, but capital punishment for witchcraft was abolished in 1736. Gibbon says that "the French and English lawyers of the present age allow the theory and deny the practice of witchcraft."

Witchcraft was a recognized crime in the laws of the New England colonies. There were several isolated cases in Massachusetts before the Salem outbreak, some of them very sad and outrageous. The persecutions all had a popular character and all showed the passion and cruelty of which a village democracy is capable against an unpopular person. Cotton Mather stands personally responsible for using his great personal influence, in connection with the Glover case (1688), to spread faith in witchcraft. Increase Mather published, in 1693, An Account of the Tryals of the New England witches, with cases of conscience concerning witchcrafts and Evil Spirits personating Men. A doctrine which he formulated and which destroyed some excellent people who were accused at Salem was that Satan could just as well appear in the person of a pious man or woman as in that of a wicked