publicly burned as sorcerers. In 1885 Christian negroes in Hayti practiced the old rites of sorcery, killing and eating children.[1] In the early history of Illinois some negroes were hanged at Cahokia for witchcraft.[2] In 1895 a woman was tortured to death, as a witch, by her relatives in Tipperary, Ireland.[3] An Associated Press dispatch of July 11, 1897, described the act of two men, in Mexico, who dragged a woman eighty years old to death, tied to their horses by the feet, for bewitching the sister of one of them. In Lyme, Connecticut, in October, 1897, a band of religious fanatics attempted to drive the devil out of a rheumatic old woman by bruising and immersing her.[4] In a cablegram in the New York Times, December 14, 1900, it was stated that an Italian in London burned a pin-studded wax image of President McKinley on the steps of the American Embassy. In 1903 a mountaineer in North Carolina, whose wife could not make the butter come, thought that a neighboring woman had bewitched the milk. He pinned up a portrait of her on the wall and shot a silver bullet through it.[5]
These cases show that belief in witchcraft is not dead. It is latent and may burst forth anew at any moment. "The difference [from age to age] is not so much in the amount of credulity as in the direction it takes."[6] At the present day it is in politics. Lecky thought that the cause of persecution was the intensity of dogmatic opinion[7]; that may be a cause, for no man is tolerant about anything about which he cares very much and
- ↑ Globus, XLVII, 252, 264.
- ↑ Reynolds, J.: History of Illinois, 51; date of the execution not given. Many modern cases are collected in the Popular Science Monthly, XLVII, 73.
- ↑ New York Times. March 31 and April 7, 1895.
- ↑ Ibid., October 26, 1897.
- ↑ Harper's Magazine, No. 637.
- ↑ Lecky, W. E. H.: Rationalism, I, 101.
- ↑ Rationalism, II, 39.
