Besides, they had a law by which they were accustomed to banish heretics, and the Quakers might very well come under that description. As regards the compelling shipmasters to carry them back to the port from which they had come, such a custom had prevailed from a very early date in the case of undesirable immigrants. Winthrop, in his History mentions the reshipping to England of a crazy pauper woman whom the parish of Willesden had sent over to the colonists in Massachusetts. The Quakers came in spite of banishment, and the more they were imprisoned and beaten the more daring became their defiance, the more violent their abuse. They spared neither priest nor magistrate, and the floods of denunciation which they poured out were portentous. It is not to be wondered at that a stern and severe people, living a hard and cruel life of constant struggle with the elements, and in the constant dread lest their privileges should be assailed, should have been cruel in their treatment of these incorrigible offenders. Judged by the common standard of the age, the cruelty of the treatment of the Quakers is not so remarkable as to be singled out above all other cruelties for reprobation. The Quakers themselves were cruel at times. George Fox himself is said to have been a witch-finder; and a son of the Samuel Shattuck who bore the king’s mandate to Endicott appears in the Salem witchcraft trials as a prominent witness against some of the unfortunates.[47] The folly and fatuity of the treatment adopted is more of a point to notice. In the colonies where the Quakers were let alone they caused no trouble. Palfrey’s sneer, that there was no order to disturb in Rhode Island, may be justified perhaps as regards that colony, but Connecticut certainly was a well-ordered commonwealth. In Massachusetts, on the contrary, the same persons kept coming again and again, and the severer the punishments the madder became their actions. It should be remembered that the acts usually mentioned as justifying the Puritans’ severity, such as the performances of the naked women at Salem and Newbury, of the men who broke bottles on the pulpit steps, and of the woman who smeared her face with black and frightened the matrons in the Old South church, were not committed until after the persecution had been carried on for years, until scores of women had been stripped naked and flogged by the authorities, until men had had their ears cut off, and until three men and one woman had been put to death upon the gallows. The persecution was a blunder, and the details of it made it a blunder of the most atrocious description. Power was put into the hands of local and irresponsible magistrates to sentence men and women to these shameful and unusual punishments, and brutal constables and jailers were entrusted with the enforcement of the law without any due supervision. The most painful part of the whole history is the attitude of the Puritan clergy, in Massachusetts especially. They were