whole system of organized society,
and given to whomsoever the management of the cases had thus, for the
time, been relinquished, a power too fearful to be thought of, as lodged
in one man, or in any private person. If he, or any other person, had
been allowed by the Court to assume such an office, and had been known
to hold, in secret custody, the accusing parties, receiving their
confidential communications, to act upon them as he saw fit--sheltering
some from prosecution and returning others to be proceeded against by
the Court, which would be equivalent to a conviction and execution--it
would have inaugurated a reign of terror, such as had not even then been
approached, and which no community could bear. Every man and woman would
have felt in the extremest peril, hanging upon the will of an
irresponsible arbiter of life and death.

Parris and his associates, acting without authority and in a limited
sphere, had tried this experiment; had spread abroad, terror, havoc, and
ruin; and incensed the surrounding region with a madness it took
generations to allay.

To have thought, for a moment, that it was desirable to be invested with
such a power, "by the authority," shows how ignorant Cotton Mather was
of human nature. However innocent, upright, or benevolent might be its
exercise, he would have been assailed by animosities of the deepest, and
approaches of the basest, kind. A hatred and a sycophancy, such as no
Priest, Pope, or despot before, had encountered, would have been brought
against him. He would have been assailed by the temptation, and aspersed
by the imputation, of "Hush money," from all quarters; and, ultimately,
the whole country would have risen against what would have been regarded
as a universal levy of "Black Mail." Whoever, at any time, in any
country, should undertake such an office as this, would be, in the end,
the victim of the outraged sensibilities and passions of humanity. How
long could it be endured, any where, if all men were liable to receive,
from one authorized and enabled to determine their fate, such a missive
as the Mathers addressed to the Secretary of Connecticut, and, at the
best, to be beholden, as he felt himself to be, to the "charity" that
might prevent their being exposed and prosecuted to the ruin of their
reputation, if not to an ignominious death?

Calef, alluding to Mather's pretensions to having been actuated by
"exceeding tenderness towards persons complained of," expr