We of to-day cannot understand the madness that inspired such cruelty. But in the light of Michelet's theory,--that in the oppression and dearth of every kind of ideal interest in rural populations some safety-valve had to be found, and that there _were_ real organised secret meetings, witches' Sabbaths, to supply this need of sensation,--the thing is less difficult to comprehend. The religious hysteria that resulted in the banishment of Mrs. Hutchinson was but another phase of the same thing. And the degeneration to be noted to-day in the remote hill-towns of New England is likewise attributable to Michelet's "dearth of ideal interest." The thing once started, it grew, of course, by what it fed upon. Professor William James, Harvard's distinguished psychologist, has traced to torture the so-called "confessions" on which the evil principally throve. A person, he says, was suddenly found to be suffering from what we to-day should call hysteria, perhaps, but what in those days was called a witch disease. A witch then had to be found to account for the disease; a scapegoat must of necessity be brought forward. Some poor old woman was thereupon picked out and subjected to atrocious torture. If she "confessed," the torture ceased. Naturally she very often "confessed," thus implicating others and damning herself. Negative suggestion this modern psychologist likewise offers as light upon witchcraft. The witches seldom cried, no matter what their anguish of mind might be. The inquisitors used to say to them then, "If you're not a witch, cry, let us see your tears. There, there! you can't cry! That proves you're a witch!" Moreover, that was an age when everybody read the Bible, and believed in its verbal inspiration. And there in Exodus (22:18), is the plain command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Cotton Mather, the distinguished young divine, had published a work affirming his belief in witchcraft, and detailing his study of some bewitched children in Charlestown, one of whom he had taken into his own family, the better to observe the case. The king believed in it, and Queen Anne, to whose name we usually prefix the adjective "good," wrote to Governor Phips a letter which shows that she admitted witchcraft as a thing unquestioned. It is in connection with the witchcraft delusion in Salem that we get the one instance in New England of the old English penalty for contumacy, that of a victim's being pressed to death. Giles Corey, who believed in witchcraft and was instrumental in the conviction of his wife, so suffered, partly to atone for his early cowardice and partly to save his property for his children. This latter thing he could not have done if he had been convicted of witchcraft, so after pleading "not guilty," he remained mute, refusing to add the necessary technical words that he would be tried "by God and his country."