ore sensible
part of the public when the punishments become frequent and are
relentlessly inflicted. Those against treason are no exception. Each
reflecting government will do well to shorten that melancholy reign of
terror which perhaps must necessarily follow on the discovery of a plot
or the defeat of an insurrection. They ought not, either in humanity or
policy, to wait till the voice of the nation calls to them, as Mecaenas
to Augustus, "_Surge tandem carnifex_!"

It is accordingly remarkable, in different countries, how often at some
particular period of their history there occurred an epidemic of terror
of witches, which, as fear is always cruel and credulous, glutted the
public with seas of innocent blood; and how uniformly men loathed the
gore after having swallowed it, and by a reaction natural to the human
mind desired, in prudence, to take away or restrict those laws which had
been the source of carnage, in order that their posterity might neither
have the will nor the means to enter into similar excesses.

A short review of foreign countries, before we come to notice the
British Islands and their Colonies, will prove the truth of this
statement. In Catholic countries on the Continent, the various kingdoms
adopted readily that part of the civil law, already mentioned, which
denounces sorcerers and witches as rebels to God, and authors of
sedition in the empire. But being considered as obnoxious equally to the
canon and civil law, Commissions of Inquisition were especially
empowered to weed out of the land the witches and those who had
intercourse with familiar spirits, or in any other respect fell under
the ban of the Church, as well as the heretics who promulgated or
adhered to false doctrine. Special warrants were thus granted from time
to time in behalf of such inquisitors, authorizing them to visit those
provinces of Germany, France, or Italy where any report concerning
witches or sorcery had alarmed the public mind; and those Commissioners,
proud of the trust reposed in them, thought it becoming to use the
utmost exertions on their part, that the subtlety of the examinations,
and the severity of the tortures they inflicted, might wring the truth
out of all suspected persons, until they rendered the province in which
they exercised their jurisdiction a desert from which the inhabitants
fled. It would be impossible to give credit to the extent of this
delusion, had not some of the inquisitors themselves