with truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were
misinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of
those witch-manias, which are too common still among the African
Negros, which were too common of old among the men of our race.

I say, among the men. To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at
it as--what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be--
man's dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of
woman.

She is to the barbarous man--she should be more and more to the
civilised man--not only the most beautiful and precious, but the
most wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only
as the author of his physical being. She is to the savage a miracle
to be alternately adored and dreaded. He dreads her more delicate
nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and
miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to
him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which
entangled him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will.
He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than his heaviest club,
more keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads those habits of
secrecy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage and
degraded woman always has recourse. He dreads the very medicinal
skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and
slave. He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious
initiations which no man may witness, which he has permitted to her
in all ages, in so many--if not all--barbarous and semi-barbarous
races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage
to the mysterious importance of her who brings him into the world.
If she turns against him--she, with all her unknown powers, she who
is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very food day
by day--what harm can she not, may she not, do? And that she has
good reason to turn against him, he knows too well. What
deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute
force? Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day.
Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.

I shall say no more. I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame,
over the most important and most significant facts of this, the most
hideous of all human follies. I have, I think, given you hints
enough to show that it, like all other superstitions, is the child--
the