2. Witchcraft in some shape or other is still credited by a majority of the human race.

3. The belief in witchcraft was practically universal in the seventeenth century, even among the educated; with the mass of the people it was absolutely universal. 4. To believe in witchcraft in the seventeenth century was no more discreditable to a man's head or heart than it was to believe in spontaneous generation or to be ignorant of the germ theory of disease.

5. The position of the seventeenth-century believers in witchcraft was logically and theologically stronger than that of the few persons who rejected the current belief.

6. The impulse to put a witch to death comes from the instinct of self-preservation. It is no more cruel or otherwise blameworthy, in itself, than the impulse to put a murderer to death.

7. The belief in witchcraft manifests itself, not in steady and continuous prosecution, but in sudden outbreaks occurring at irregular intervals.

8. Such outbreaks are not symptoms of extraordinary superstition or of a peculiarly acute state of unreason. They are due, like other panics, to a perturbed condition of the public mind. Hence they are likely to accompany, or to follow, crises in politics or religion.

9. The responsibility for any witch prosecution rests primarily on the community or neighborhood as a whole, not on the judge or the jury.

10. No jury, whether in a witch trial or in any other case, can be more enlightened than the general run of the vicinage.

11. Many persons who have been executed for witchcraft have supposed themselves to be guilty and have actually been guilty in intent.

12. Practically every person executed for witchcraft believed in the reality of such a crime, whether he supposed himself to be guilty of it or not.

13. The witch beliefs of New England were brought over from the Mother Country by the first settlers.

14. Spectral evidence had been admitted in the examinations and trials of witches in England for a hundred years before the Salem prosecutions took place.

15. Trials, convictions, and executions for witchcraft occurred in England after they had come to an end in Massachusetts, and they occurred on the Continent a hundred years later than that time.

16. Spectral evidence was admitted in English witch trials after such trials had ceased in Massachusetts.

17. The total number of persons executed for witchcraft in New England from the first settlement to the end of the century is inconsiderable, especially in view of what was going on in Europe.

18. The public repentance and recantation of judge and jury in Massachusetts have no parallel in the history of witchcraft.

19. The repentance and recantation came at a time which made them singularly effective arguments in the hands of the opponents of the witch dogma in England.

20. The record of New England in the matter of witchcraft is highly creditable, when considered as a whole and from the comparative point of view.

21. It is easy to be wise after the fact, especially when the fact is two hundred years old.