Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/161

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WITCHCRAFT
125

publicly burned as sorcerers. In 1885 Christian negroes in Hayti practiced the old rites of sorcery, killing and eating children.[1] In the early history of Illinois some negroes were hanged at Cahokia for witchcraft.[2] In 1895 a woman was tortured to death, as a witch, by her relatives in Tipperary, Ireland.[3] An Associated Press dispatch of July 11, 1897, described the act of two men, in Mexico, who dragged a woman eighty years old to death, tied to their horses by the feet, for bewitching the sister of one of them. In Lyme, Connecticut, in October, 1897, a band of religious fanatics attempted to drive the devil out of a rheumatic old woman by bruising and immersing her.[4] In a cablegram in the New York Times, December 14, 1900, it was stated that an Italian in London burned a pin-studded wax image of President McKinley on the steps of the American Embassy. In 1903 a mountaineer in North Carolina, whose wife could not make the butter come, thought that a neighboring woman had bewitched the milk. He pinned up a portrait of her on the wall and shot a silver bullet through it.[5]

These cases show that belief in witchcraft is not dead. It is latent and may burst forth anew at any moment. "The difference [from age to age] is not so much in the amount of credulity as in the direction it takes."[6] At the present day it is in politics. Lecky thought that the cause of persecution was the intensity of dogmatic opinion[7]; that may be a cause, for no man is tolerant about anything about which he cares very much and

  1. Globus, XLVII, 252, 264.
  2. Reynolds, J.: History of Illinois, 51; date of the execution not given. Many modern cases are collected in the Popular Science Monthly, XLVII, 73.
  3. New York Times. March 31 and April 7, 1895.
  4. Ibid., October 26, 1897.
  5. Harper's Magazine, No. 637.
  6. Lecky, W. E. H.: Rationalism, I, 101.
  7. Rationalism, II, 39.