The majority of the persons condemned in Salem were either old or weak-witted, victims who in their testimony condemned themselves, or seemed to the jury to do so. Tituba, the Indian slave, is an example of this. She was tried in March, 1692, by the Justice Corwin of the big, dark house. She confessed that under threats from Satan, who had most often appeared to her as a man in black, accompanied by a yellow bird, she had tortured the girls who appeared against her. She named accomplices, and was condemned to imprisonment. After a few months she was sold to pay the expenses of her lodging in jail, and is lost to history. But this was by no means the end of the matter. The "afflicted children" in Salem who had made trouble before now began to accuse men and women of unimpeachable character. Within a few months several hundred people were arrested and thrown into jails. As Governor Hutchinson, the historian of the time, points out, the only way to prevent an accusation was to become an accuser oneself. The state of affairs was indeed analogous to that which obtained in France a century later, when, during the Reign of Terror, men of property and position lived in the hourly fear of being regarded as "a suspect," and frequently threw suspicion on their neighbours the better to retain their own heads.
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!"