robbed the honest miner
of his "Pile," by bare-faced fraud; mock auction sharpers, high-toned
frauds and swindlers of low degree; and others who neither toiled nor
spun, yet feasted and fattened. All these found in the ranks of the
Committee their own security from the incarceration and banishment
enforced in the case of so many less culpable than themselves. But the
onus rests upon the Executive Committee--they constituted the head and
front of the grave offending of the very laws they usurped; they were
the counselors and administrators, the accusers and arbiters, of the
fate of their powerless victims. Their's was a tribunal organized to
convict--they were the prosecutors, the jurors, the judges, from whose
fiat of condemnation there was no appeal; and defense was not allowed.
Arrest meant death or banishment. The accused were prosecuted by the
promoter or participant with them in the charged offence or crime, and
convicted by the verdict in which some who had been accessories were
most strenuous for conviction. It is a rule of law that the accuser
shall come into Court with clean hands.

Ignoring this just rule and in defiance of law, in usurping the seat of
justice, the Executive Committee gave opportunity to several of its
members to "compound for sins they were inclined to, by damning those
who had no mind to;" to sit in judgment on those whose testimony or
confession in a Court of Justice would have turned the tables and
wrought the conviction of their accusers, prosecutors and judges. But
these strictures do not apply to the greater number of the Executive
Committee--to only about a half dozen of its members. The Committee was
composed mainly of honorable men, deservedly high in the community, in
every walk and relation of life. They doubtless acted from a
conscientious sense of duty, and neither intended usurpation of the law,
violence to justice, nor any wrong whatever. They believed it incumbent
upon them to reform what they regarded as the maladministration of
public affairs, and to cleanse the city of the corruption which
existed--as it has existed and always will exist in populous communities,
agreeably to the sentiment of Jefferson, that "cities are scabs upon the
body politic." And with the best of motives they believed that the
organization of the Vigilance committee was the better and surer
remedial agent to these wholesome and commendable purposes. But their
action was akin to that of the thousands