In accordance with the same advice “that the old book of records be kept in being,” it was ordered by the meeting to leave the votes that had, by the foregoing proceedings, been rendered null and void, to “lie in the old book of records as they are.”  From the new book of records we learn that “some votes are left out that passed in Mr. Bayley’s days, and some that passed in Mr. Burroughs’s days,” particularly all the votes but one that passed at a meeting held on the fifth day of June, 1683, the very time that Mr. Burroughs was under bonds in the action of debt brought by John Putnam.  The new record specifies some few, but not all, of the votes that were rescinded because it was adjudged that they had not rightfully passed, or been correctly stated.  Unfortunately, the old book, after all, has not been “kept in being;” and much that would have exhibited more fully and clearly the unhappy early history of the parish is for ever lost.  If the records that have been suffered to remain present the picture I have endeavored faithfully to draw, how much darker might have been its shades had we been permitted to behold what the parties concerned concurred in thinking too bad to be left to view!

The attempt to expunge records is always indefensible, besides being in itself irrational and absurd.  It may cover up the details of wrong and folly; but it leaves an unlimited range to the most unfriendly conjecture.  We are compelled to imagine what we ought to be allowed to know; and, in many particulars, our fancies may be worse than the facts.  But later times, and public bodies of greater pretensions than “the inhabitants of Salem Village,” have attempted, and succeeded in perpetrating, this outrage upon history.  In trying to conceal their errors, men have sometimes destroyed the means of their vindication.  This may be the case with the story that is to be told of “Salem Witchcraft.”  It has been the case in reference to wider fields of history.  The Parliamentary journals and other public records of the period of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate were suppressed by the infatuated stupidity of the Government of the Restoration.  They foolishly imagined that they were hiding the shame, while they were obscuring the glory, of their country.  Every Englishman, every intelligent man, now knows, that, during that very period, all that has made England great was done.  The seeds of her naval and maritime prosperity were planted:  and she was pushed at once by wise measures of policy, internal and external; by legislation developing her resources and invigorating the power of her people; by a decisive and comprehensive diplomacy that commanded the respect of foreign courts, and secured to her a controlling influence upon the traffic of the world; by developments of her military genius under the greatest of all the great generals of modern times; and by naval achievements that snatched into her hands the balancing trident of the seas,—­to the place