But were one to trace the career of several others of that body, the
tracks would be through the sloughs and conduits of shame and turpitude,
rascality and crime, and finally to self-murder. It was as bad - it
could hardly have been worse, except in numbers, proportioned to the
greater numerical force - in the Vigilance rank and file. It is against
reason and sense to expect that in a body of five thousand men, there
will be none who are not good and honorable; that there will be no base
and disreputable characters, no rogues and scoundrels. Therefore it was
not strange that of the Committee's entire force, so many were of the
vile stamp, notorious gold-dust "operators," who 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