The Devil in Law. of them, 'who if they had been left unpun ished would easily have brought the whole world to destruction.' " (Lea's History of the Inquisition," vol. Ill, p. 549.3 The horrors enacted in France, and still more in Germany, during the seventeenth century surpass description. England and Scotland did not lag behind in this fearful slaughter of innocents. Nor was the perse cution confined to the Old World. The Puritans who fled from oppression perse cuted in their turn, and witches were as badly treated in New England as heretics. The number of victims is an unknown quantity. A writer in Popular Science Monthly for 1893, says: "Not to mention torture, torture beyond the wildest flights of modern fancy, the number of persons who perished, chiefly by fire, in Christian Europe and America has been calculated at from one to nine millions. Probably four millions is a correct estimate." The last trial in England was in 1712. The woman was convicted but not executed; this according to "Encyclopaedia Brittanica." But Campbell, in his "Puritan in Holland, England and America," says two victims were executed in 1711, two others in 1716, and five in 1722; in Scotland the last execu tion was in 1722; in 1780 a witch was burned in Spain; in 1793 in Germany; in 1807 one was tortured and burnt in France; in 1850 a man and his wife tortured and killed a woman suspected of witchcraft in France, and it was with some difficulty that they were punished at all, on account of the lingering beliefs of the people. In 1874 several were burnt in Mexico; in 1879 and 1880 some witches were burnt in Russia, and even since that date some judicial trials for this crime were held in Austria and Prussia. In 1875 one H ayward was charged at the Warwick Assizes with the murder of a woman of eighty. He said he had been overlooked by her, and he quoted Lev. xx, 27, as his justification. (See also the cases mentioned in THE GREEN BAG, vol. Ill, p. 94.)
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Belief in witchcraft still lived in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1893, in the village of Lupert, in Austria, lived an old woman thought to be a witch. When she died the town authorities ordered a public merriment; while this was in progress the burgomaster's cow died. Evidently the witch, though dead, yet wrought. Matters had to be sifted; a black stallion was pro cured, and they tried to drive it over the old woman's grave, but the horse kicked and plunged and would not cross the spot where the body of the sorceress lay. Then the villagers pulled the corpse from the grave and burnt it, singing, praying and sprinkling themselves and the ground with holy water. At night they celebrated their triumph over the powers of darkness by drinking and dancing. In England, the same year, at the Yeovil Petty Sessions, a man was bound over to keep the peace for calling a woman a witch, saying she had cast a spell over his sister, and threatening to knock her brains out; and the next year a Lancashire youth was bound over for having pricked his sweet heart with a pin; a wise woman had told him that his sickness was caused by a charm the girl had and that shedding her blood would break the spell. In 1893, in Ohio, a witch doctor told a farmer, who was digging for water, that the poisonous breath and evil eye of a neighbor kept water out of the well, and that nothing but the death of the witch would remedy the matter. As all these persons belonged to the same Methodist church a church trial was the result. In Pennsylvania, about the same time, a poor epileptic child was bar barously tortured in order that the devils which afflicted her might be cast out. In 1895, Michael Cleary, living near Clonmel, Ireland, was convicted of man slaughter, for having, with the advice of the family doctor and in the presence of her father and a number of other relatives, stript his wife, poured paraffin over her and burnt her to death in the kitchen fire. None of the
