ying ground near by.

The majority of the persons condemned in Salem were either old or
weak-witted, victims who in their testimony condemned themselves, or
seemed to the jury to do so. Tituba, the Indian slave, is an example of
this. She was tried in March, 1692, by the Justice Corwin of the big,
dark house. She confessed that under threats from Satan, who had most
often appeared to her as a man in black, accompanied by a yellow bird,
she had tortured the girls who appeared against her. She named
accomplices, and was condemned to imprisonment. After a few months she
was sold to pay the expenses of her lodging in jail, and is lost to
history. But this was by no means the end of the matter. The "afflicted
children" in Salem who had made trouble before now began to accuse men
and women of unimpeachable character. Within a few months several
hundred people were arrested and thrown into jails. As Governor
Hutchinson, the historian of the time, points out, the only way to
prevent an accusation was to become an accuser oneself. The state of
affairs was indeed analogous to that which obtained in France a century
later, when, during the Reign of Terror, men of property and position
lived in the hourly fear of being regarded as "a suspect," and
frequently threw suspicion on their neighbours the better to retain
their own heads.

We of to-day cannot understand the madness that inspired such cruelty.
But in the light of Michelet's theory,--that in the oppression and
dearth of every kind of ideal interest in rural populations some
safety-valve had to be found, and that there _were_ real organised
secret meetings, witches' Sabbaths, to supply this need of
sensation,--the thing is less difficult to comprehend. The religious
hysteria that resulted in the banishment of Mrs. Hutchinson was but
another phase of the same thing. And the degeneration to be noted to-day
in the remote hill-towns of New England is likewise attributable to
Michelet's "dearth of ideal interest."

The thing once started, it grew, of course, by what it fed upon.
Professor William James, Harvard's distinguished psychologist, has
traced to torture the so-called "confessions" on which the evil
principally throve. A person, he says, was suddenly found to be
suffering from what we to-day should call hysteria, perhaps, but what in
those days was called a witch disease. A witch then had to be found to
account for the disease; a scapegoat must of necessity be brought