unate being terribly frost bitten. At Salmon Falls, the party sent
by Frontenac against New Hampshire, killed thirty of the inhabitants,
took fifty-four prisoners, and burned the village. At Casco, in Maine,
the third party killed and captured one hundred persons. Such was the
business of colonists in those days. In Canada the majority had no
voice in popular affairs. Governors, Intendants, Seigniors, and
Priests, controlled the colonists as they willed. However much the
Governor may have despised the Intendant, the Intendant the Seignior,
or the Priest all put together, the merchant, artisan, and peasant
were of no account. Wealth without title was only a bait for extortion.
The peasantry were serfs, and the nobles uneducated despots. Education
was in the hands of the clergy, while power was solely vested in the
Heads of Military Departments. But if ignorance was particularly
characteristic of the Canadians, the New Englanders could lay little
claim to superior enlightenment. Harvard's College, in Massachusetts,
had apparently done no more for the New Englanders, in 1692, than the
Seminary of Quebec, in the way of diffusing a knowledge of letters
among the people, from which the desire for freedom invariably springs,
had done for Canada. The people of Salem, Andover, Ipswich, Gloucester,
and even Boston, were accusing each other of witchcraft. A "contagious"
malady, which affected children of ten, twelve or fifteen years of age,
it was, oddly enough, said by the learned physicians of the period, was
the result of witchcraft. A respectable merchant of Salem, and his
wife, were accused of bewitching children; the sons of Governor
Bradstreet were implicated in the divinations; and the wife of Sir
William Phipps was not above suspicion. One man, for refusing to put
himself on trial by jury, was pressed to death. Nor was Giles Correy
the only sufferer:--nineteen persons, "members of the Church", were
executed, and one hundred and fifty persons were put in prison. It was
sometime before the conviction began to spread, that even men of sense,
education, and fervent piety could entertain the madness and
infatuation of the weak, illiterate, and unprincipled. A disbeliever in
witchcraft was an 'obdurate sadducee.' That conviction did at last
possess men. The disease which affected the supposed bewitched children
somewhat resembled St. Vitus' Dance. It was an involuntary motion of
the muscles. The affected were sometimes deaf, some