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 of citizens who refrain from
voting at primary elections, where the seed is planted which will
produce its kind in the fruiting on the day of the final and determining
election, and subsequently complain of the incompetency or dishonesty of
the incumbents whose election is largely attributable to the neglect of
these very citizens, to make it their special care that only good and
qualified and worthy men shall be elected at the primaries.

I shall now pass to the conduct of the Executive Committee in their
arrests, their domiciling visits, and their enforced banishments. Among
their victims in the category, banished from the State with the penalty
of death if they returned to it, were Charles P. Duane, Billy Mulligan,
Billy Carr, Reub. Maloney, Bill Lewis, Martin Gallagher, Woolley