The readiness with which all “evidence” was acclaimed and the appalling means by which it was got together placed any abnormal person in constant peril, and will account for the enormous numbers of the implicated. Tens of thousands of victims, says Lecky,[[597]] perished by the most agonising and protracted torments without exciting the faintest compassion. In a single German city they used to burn 300 witches annually.[[598]] In Nancy, 800 were put to death by a judge in the course of sixteen years.[[599]] Zachary Gray,[[600]] who edited an edition of Hudibras, claims that during the Long Parliament 500 witches were executed each year, and that he read through a list of no less than 3000 of them.[[601]] The total of Great Britain has been estimated at 30,000,[[602]] and it has been estimated that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the witch death-roll for Europe[[603]] reached 200,000 people.[[604]]

Perhaps the sidelights give a more graphic conception of what went on in those dark days of error. Listen to this complaint of a French writer[[605]] who evidently thought he was approaching the “last days.” “Was it [sorcery] ever so much in vogue as here in this unhappy [sixteenth] century? The benches of our courts are all blackened by them; there are not sufficient magistrates to hear the cases. Our prisons are gorged with witches, and not a day passes but our warrants are ensanguined with them, and we return saddened to our homes, shocked at the ghastly and appalling things that they confess.” And in our own land, about fifty years later, we come upon a letter written to Sir Edmund Spencer in 1647: “Within the compass of two years near upon 300 witches were arraigned, and the greater part executed, in Essex and Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them now more than ever, and persons of good quality executed daily.”[[606]]

It was in Scotland, likewise, that there used to be kept a chest “locked with three severall locks and opened every fifteenth daie,”[[607]] which might receive, as did the Lion’s Mouth at Venice, denunciations slipped in secretly; and that in 1661 the justices were ordered to attend certain towns to hear cases of witchcraft at least once a week.[[608]]

The witch trials are ended. So far as they are concerned, we can look back from the heights of history over this vast red sea of superstition which has swallowed up such multitudes. And to think it was all so useless, so unnecessary![[609]] but yet by no means hard to be explained. The underlying and provocative phenomena had really been present in a huge number of cases (and when they were not, were fervently conceived, and so suggested, looked for, and enforced as to set up all kinds of hallucinations in the accusers and sometimes in the accused), and in default of tracing out their causes,[[610]] evident or recondite, clergy and jurists, and of course the populace, gave out a false and thaumaturgical account of them. They were correct in affirming many amazing facts and phenomena (and all these persist, for nature has not changed.[[611]] There are at least as many abnormal and half-mad people amongst us now as there ever were, only we treat the clearer cases kindly, and are no longer afraid of mythical influences), although these were magnified and multiplied million-fold, for Superstition is a monster that grows by feeding. They were fantastic in their fabulous explanations of them. The rest—in those cruel times when torture was as common as is cross-examination—followed quite naturally. The doctors, theological and legal, erred in their diagnosis, mistaking diseases for devils and abnormality for magic. We shall come upon this again, crass and close at hand. May the Future condemn the Present, as we now deplore the Past.

CHAPTER III
TREATMENT OF THE INSANE

As the abnormal and the rationally eccentric were considered witches, and held to have been disciples of the devil, so the more obviously sense-bereft were thought to be controlled by the fiends within them. Both witches and lunatics were held to be beneath the sway of infernal powers, but the former as willing agents of the devil, and the latter as involuntary victims, who were deemed to be possessed. In ancient Egypt, by the Temple of Saturn,[[612]] in classic Greece with the Asclepieia, and by the laws of Pagan Rome,[[613]] the mentally afflicted were treated with humanity, and, if without the aid of our present science, at least upon the same broad principles which we adopt to-day.

In the warm sunlight of the Eastern lands the life of the population was spent in the open air. As we read in the Scriptures and in books of travel, the lunatic might dwell amidst the tombs. He could wander through the soothing cypress groves in the moonlight or lie under shading palm in the noontide heat. He dwelt apart, like the leper, cut off by his terrible infirmity from the kinship of reason, but free at least in the air and sunlight, and often allowed a quite especial licence[[614]] as being in the guardianship of God.[[615]] But the troublesome conduct into which lunatics were ever liable to be led[[616]] would frequently rouse the instinct of retaliation, and bring down swift and heavy punishment upon them.[[617]]

In Europe also and in England the less-dangerous lunatics “were allowed to wander about the country,[[618]] beggars and vagabonds, affording sport[[619]] and mockery.” We get a vivid glimpse from Shakespeare of that “poor Tom[[620]] that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall newt and the water newt, that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch dog, drinks the green mantle of the slimy pool;[[621]] who is whipt from tything to tything, and stocked, punished, and imprisoned.”[[622]]

This was the lot of sufferers in those times, and beyond doubt a certain number of them, unmindful or unheedful of savage laws, obeyed the obsessing suicidal impulse which is so common among mad people; and through this many of the most afflicted must have been taken, in the mercy of nature, out of the world of men in which they had no part. But if the half-witted poor were allowed to wander,[[623]] those of the richer class were less fortunate. Their families were shy and ashamed of them; they were concealed and locked in garrets and cellars, or penned apart, secured in sheds and outhouses—fastened up anywhere about the premises.[[624]]