ustice. All manner of tortures
were freely applied to force confessions. In Scotland "the boot" was
used, being an iron case in which the legs are locked up to the knees,
and an iron wedge then driven in until sometimes the bones were crushed
and the marrow spouted out. Pin sticking, drowning, starving, the rack,
were too common to need details. Sometimes the prisoner was hung up by
the thumbs, and whipped by one person, while another held lighted
candles to the feet and other parts of the body. At Arras, while the
prisoners were being torn on the rack, the executioner stood by, sword
in hand, promising to cut off at once the heads of those who did not
confess. At Offenburg, when the prisoners had been tortured until
beyond the power of speaking aloud, they silently assented to abominable
confessions read to them out of a book. Many were cheated into
confession by the promise of pardon and release, and then burned. A poor
woman in Germany was tricked by the hangman, who dressed himself up as a
devil and went into her cell. Overpowered by pain, fear and
superstition, she begged him to help her out; her beseeching was taken
for confession, she was burned, and a ballad which treated the trick as
a jolly and comical device, was long popular in the country. Several of
the judges in witch cases tell us how victims, utterly weary of their
tormented lives, confessed whatever was required, merely as the shortest
way to death, and an escape out of their misery. All who dared to argue
against the current of popular and judicial delusion were instantly
refuted very effectively by being attacked for witchcraft themselves;
and once accused, there was little hope of escape. The Jesuit Delrio, in
a book published in 1599, states the witch killers' side of the
discussion very neatly indeed; for in one and the same chapter he defies
any opponents to disprove the existence of witchcraft, and then shows
that a denial of witchcraft is the worst of all heresies, and must be
punished with death. Quite a number of excellent and sensible people
were actually burnt on just this principle.

I do not undertake to give details of any witch trials; this sketch of
the way in which they operated is all I can make room for, and
sufficiently delineates this cruel and bloody humbug.

I have already referred to the fact that we have right here among us in
this city a very fair supply of a vulgar, dowdy kind of witchcraft.
Other countries are favored in l