Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/160

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124
ESSAYS OF WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER

doctrines are in the twelve findings of the court In 1756 a fourteen-year-old girl was beheaded as a witch at Landshut, in Bavaria, because she had made a wager with the devil. In 1782, at Glarus, in Switzerland, a maid-servant was executed for witchcraft; she had given pin-seed to a child, which germinated in its stomach so that it spat pins. The last witch execution in Germany was in 1775, a woman charged with carnal intercourse with Satan.[1] In Poland and Hungary witch-persecutions continued until the end of the eighteenth century.[2] In 1672 Colbert directed the judges in France to receive no accusation of sorcery against anyone,[3] but in 1718 the Parliament of Rouen burned a man for that crime.[4] In 1781 the Inquisition burned a witch at Seville for making a pact with Satan and practicing fornication with him.[5] "Incredible to relate, on the 22d of April, 1751, a rabble of about five thousand persons beset the workhouse at Tring, in Hertfordshire, where, seizing Luke Osborne and his wife, two persons suspected of witchcraft, they ducked them in a pond till the old woman died; after which her corpse was put to bed to her husband by the mob, of whom only one person was hanged for this detestable outrage."[6] The last law about witchcraft in the British Islands was an Irish statute, which was not repealed until 1821.[7] In 1823 a court in the island of Martinique condemned a man to the galleys for life for "vehement suspicion" of sorcery.[8] In 1863 an old man was put to death by a mob, as a wizard, at Essex, England.[9] In 1873 a witch was burned in Spanish South America.[10] In 1874, in Mexico, several persons were

  1. Hoensbroech: l.c., I, 551.
  2. Scherr, J.: l.c., 387.
  3. Lecky, W. E. H.: Rationalism, I, 117.
  4. Ibid., 118.
  5. Hansen. J.: l.c., 532.
  6. Sharpe, C. K.: l.c., 176.
  7. Lecky, W. E. H.: Rationalism, I, 70.
  8. Lea, H. C.: l.c., I, 561.
  9. Lecky, W. E. H.: Rationalism, I, 139.
  10. Umschau, VII, 241.