few pains on the persons of those she disliked, or to cause them to lose
part of their property. This was almost always the whole story, except
the mere details of the witch baptism and witch sabbath, parodies on the
ceremonies of the Christian religion. And the mystery is, how anybody
could believe that to accomplish such very small results, seldom equal
even to the death of an enemy, one would agree to accept eternal
damnation in the next world, almost certain poverty, misery, persecution
and torment in this, besides having for an amusement performances more
dirty, obscene and vulgar than I can even hint at.

But such a belief was universal, and hundreds of the witches themselves
confessed as much as I have described, and more, with numerous details,
and they were burnt alive for their trouble. The extent of wholesale
murdering perpetrated under forms of law, on charges of witchcraft, is
astonishing. A magistrate named Remigius, published a book in which he
told how much he thought of himself for having condemned and burned nine
hundred witches in sixteen years, in Lorraine. And the one thing that he
blamed himself for was this: that out of regard for the wishes of a
colleague, he had only caused certain children to be whipped naked three
times round the market place where their parents had been burned,
instead of burning them. At Bamberg, six hundred persons were burned in
five years, at Wurzburg nine hundred in two years. Sprenger, a German
inquisitor-general, and author of a celebrated book on detecting and
punishing witchcraft, called _Malleus Maleficarum_, or "The Mallet of
Malefactors," burned more than five hundred in one year. In Geneva, five
hundred persons were burned during 1515 and 1516. In the district of
Como in Italy, a thousand persons were burned as witches in the single
year 1524, besides over a hundred a year for several years afterwards.
_Seventeen thousand_ persons were executed for witchcraft in Scotland
during thirty-nine years, ending with 1603. _Forty thousand_ were
executed in England from 1600 to 1680. Bodinus, another of the witch
killing judges, gravely announced that there were undoubtedly not less
than three hundred thousand witches in France.

The way in which the witch murderers reasoned, and their modes of
conducting trials and procuring confessions, were truly infernal. The
chief rule was that witchcraft being an "exceptional crime," no regard
need be had to the ordinary forms of j