[34] A wretched little werewolf who some few years ago, being then a lad of fourteen or fifteen years, most cruelly murdered two or three young children, just to amuse himself with their dying agonies. The misdirected "humanitarianism," which in our country makes every murderer an object of popular sympathy, prevailed to save this creature from the gallows. Massachusetts has lately witnessed a similar instance of misplaced clemency in the case of a vile woman who had poisoned eight or ten persons, including some of her own children, in order to profit by their life insurance. Such instances help to explain the prolonged vitality of "Judge Lynch," and sometimes almost make one regret the days in old England when William Probert, after escaping in 1824 as "king's evidence," from the Thurtell affair, got caught and hanged within a twelvemonth for horse-stealing. Any one who wishes to study the results of allowing criminality to survive and propagate itself should read Dugdale's The Jukes; Hereditary Crime, New York, 1877. [35] Weeden, _Indian Money as a Factor in New England Civilization_, Johns Hopkins University Studies, II. viii., ix. p. 30. [36] Doyle, ii. 253. [37] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 254. [38] The quotation is from an unpublished letter of Rev. Robert Ratcliffe to the Bishop of London, cited in an able article in the _Boston Herald_, January 4, 1888. I have not seen the letter. [39] Doyle, _Puritan Colonies_, ii. 379, 380. End of Project Gutenberg's The Beginnings of New England, by John Fiske