man perverted derived from witnessing suffering, and that the agony of the victims of the rack and the thumbscrew was music to brutal and bestial natures; just as the North American Indian often tortured his white captives for the mere pleasure of gloating over their pain. In this we do fanatics and zealots an injustice. There were of course many violent and passionate men who took as keen delight in inflicting torture as the average man, humanized and softened by contact with his fellowmen and the refining influences that come from an orderly and well-regulated system of society, now takes in relieving suffering and endeavoring to prevent it; but the great majority who maimed and slew for the glory of religion believed in their mission, and were sustained by the thought that they were carrying on the work for which they were anointed.

Had the Puritans of New England treated the Quakers otherwise than in the way they did, we might well believe in the theory of "miracle" set up by their over-zealous but injudicious defenders and find proof that they were touched by the divine spark; but the fact that the Puritans went about their congenial work of hanging and flogging and imprisoning is evidence enough to the impartial investigator that the Englishman in Massachusetts was no different from the Englishman in London or Lincolnshire. Quakers were put to death on Boston Common for the same reason that the fires

had been lighted under the bodies of Protestants in Smithfield Market. Salvation was free, it was offered with outstretched hands to whoever would embrace it, but it must be salvation of the approved brand. Whoever was presumptuous enough to crave a different brand of salvation from that which the ruling powers regarded as their own monopoly was a traitor to God and man. And God was always invoked to justify every vile impulse. What abominable hypocrisy it seems to praise God for an epidemic of smallpox which swept away the Indians, but to the conscience of the seventeenth century it was a mark of divine favor. In 1633 the Aberginians near Charlestown were sorely stricken, and thus piously writes a Puritan who saw in everything the hand of God:

"By which awful and admirable dispensation it pleased God to make room for his people of the English nation; who, after this, in the immediate years following, came from England by many hundreds every year to us, who, without this remarkable and terrible stroke of God upon the natives, would with much more difficulty have found room, and at far greater charge have obtained and purchased land."

Excuses have been found for the Puritan persecution of the Quakers. We have been told that they offended the sober taste of the Puritans by their extravagance and indecency in dress; that their manners and speech were offensive; that they made

sport of religion and sought to overthrow civil institutions; that women shocked public morality by appearing in public places clothed in the garments of original sin. Stern as the Puritans were in their morality, it was no shock to their moral nature to look upon women naked in the hands of the executioners. Women bared to the waist had been flogged through the streets, other women had been stripped naked for examination. It was not a day when the offender was treated with consideration or pains were taken not to wound his feelings. The Puritan treatment of the Quakers was brutal in the extreme, unthinkable in this day, but exactly in keeping with the day in which it happened.1

In 1656 Anne Austin and Mary Fisher came to Boston from the Barbadoes, and Richard Bellingham, the deputy governor, arrested them and kept them in prison for five weeks until a ship was ready to return them whence they came. Soon after their departure, the stern and fanatical Endicott returned home. He found fault with Bellingham's conduct as too gentle; "if he had been there he would have had the hussies flogged. Five years afterwards Mary Fisher went to Adrianople and

1 I have not considered it necessary to cite specific instances of Quaker persecution or the numerous statutes directed against these pestiferous enemies of the theocratic state, as the general fact is too well known to the student of early American history; but the curious reader who seeks more light on the subject may read with interest Elliott's New England History, Sewell's History of the Quakers, Hallowell's Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts, Bishop's New England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord, Besse's Sufferings of the Quakers.

tried to convert the Grand Turk, who treated her with grave courtesy and allowed her to prophesy unmolested. This is one of the numerous incidents that on a superficial view of history might be cited in support of the opinion that there has been on the whole more tolerance in the Mussulman than in the Christian world. Rightly interpreted, however, the fact has no such implication. In Massachusetts the preaching of Quaker doctrines might (and did) lead to a revolution; in Turkey it was as harmless as the barking of dogs. Governor Endicott was afraid of Mary Fisher; Mahomet IV was not." 1

On all fours with the persecution of the Quakers the Puritan treatment of witches and witchcraft, and the happenings that have made Salem worldfamous when much more important places are unknown, is a stone always cast by the ignorant defamers of Puritanism. "Writers who dislike Puritanism have rubbed the sad old story into the sore place unmercifully, as if the colonists at Salem ought to have been superior to the ideas of their age." Professor Kittredge, in his "Notes on Witchcraft," holds a brief for the men of Salem and by a plea of confession and avoidance argues that instead of being worse than their kinsmen at home they were really better. Here again it is not necessary to seek excuses. Belief in evil spirits, in the league between the devil and his agents in human

1 Fiske: The Beginnings of New England, p. 183.

'Lang: Salem Vindicated, London Morning Post, October 18, 1907. • American Antiquarian Society, new series, vol. xviii, p. 148.

form, in necromancy, witchcraft, and black magic existed from the dawn of creation until long after the Puritans set foot on New England soil. It was a belief confined not alone to the ignorant or the superstitious; it was shared by some of the most learned and subtle minds of the day. The Puritan had only to turn to his constitution to read there the punishment to be meted out to witches and those who practiced witchcraft. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," was one of the divine commandments;1 and again the Puritan read that "there shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch." Of Manasseh the Puritan read that "he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger."

3

The belief in witchcraft was not confined to any one people or to any particular religion; it was as profoundly a conviction among the poor and unlettered as it was among the rich and learned. In the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth, and James I statutes against witches were enacted in England; on the continent witches were tortured 'Deuteronomy xviii, 10.

1 Exodus xxii, 18.

32 Chronicles xxxiii, 6.