Nobody will ask for evidence that railing and brawling went on in colonial New England, that our forefathers sometimes called each other bad names, or that slander was a common offence.[122] That suspicion of witchcraft was rife in various neighborhoods years before the Salem outbreak, is proved, not only by the records of sporadic cases that came before the courts,[123] but by some of the evidence in the Salem prosecution itself. That the initial responsibility for prosecution usually rested with the neighborhood or community might further be shown by many specific pieces of testimony. The terrible prosecution in Trier toward the close of the sixteenth century is a case in point. “Since it was commonly believed,” writes Linden, an eyewitness, “that the continued failure of the crops for many years was caused by witches and wizards through diabolical malice, the whole country rose up for the annihilation of the witches.”[124] To like purpose are the words of the admirable Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, in the closing chapter of the most powerful and convincing protest against witch trials ever written--that chapter which the author begged every magistrate in Germany to mark and weigh, whether he read the rest of the book or not:--“Incredible are the superstition, the envy, the slanders and backbitings, the whisperings and gossip of the common people in Germany, which are neither punished by magistrates nor reproved by preachers. These are the causes that first rouse suspicion of witchcraft. All the punishments of divine justice with which God has threatened men in the Holy Scriptures are held to come from witches. God and nature no longer do anything,--witches, everything. Hence it is that all demand, with violent outcry, that the magistracy shall proceed against the witches, whom only their own tongues have made so numerous.”[125] As for England, the annals of witchcraft are full of instances which show where the initial responsibility rests in particular prosecutions. Two examples will serve as well as many. Roger North, the distinguished lawyer, who was at Exeter in 1682, when a famous witch trial occurred,[126] gives a vivid account of the popular excitement:--[127] “The women were very old, decrepit, and impotent, and were brought to the assizes with as much noise and fury of the rabble against them as could be shewed on any occasion. The stories of their acts were in everyone’s mouth, and they were not content to belie them in the country, but even in the city where they were to be tried miracles were fathered upon them, as that the judges’ coach was fixed upon the castle bridge, and the like. All which the country believed, and accordingly persecuted the wretched old creatures. A less zeal in a city or kingdom hath been the overture of defection and revolution, and if these women had been acquitted, it was thought that the country people would have committed some disorder.”[128]