It ended with Commodore Farragut’s thrilling words.  In a week or more Hopkins was considered past danger from his wound, and Judge Terry was thereupon set free.  The Committee had now accomplished about all that had been contemplated at its organization.  It had put to death four men.  Of these at least two were not guilty of murder, as the law defines that crime.  As to the other two, the course of justice in the Courts at that time gave no warrant for the presumption or belief that a fair and just trial would not have, been given them; that their conviction and the death penalty would not have followed.  It is not too much to assert that, so far as escape from the penalty of murder is involved, there has been, any time these ten years, and there is now, in San Francisco, stronger cause for a Vigilance Committee than there was in 1856.  The administration of the law was better then in general criminal procedure than it is now.  There were fewer heinous crimes then, in the ratio of population, then the record of any year for the past ten years will show.  In the category of crimes, such as forgery, perjury, embezzlement, frauds by which large sums of money or valuable property is obtained, were then infrequent; now of daily occurrence.  But in crimes of violence the record is enormously against this period in comparison with that; the infliction of penalties by the Courts was then more certain than it is now.  And as to ballot-box stuffing and frauds in elections, surely the worst ever charged against the manipulators of that period, pales and sinks into insignificance when compared with the colossal fraud committed in San Francisco, in 1876, by which not only the will of the people of the State was overborne, but also the will of the people of the United States.  Yet the perpetrators of the unparalleled fraud have never been called to account or punished; to the contrary they are recognized as gentlemen of respectability, even by those who, in 1856, forcibly and lawlessly, as Vigilance Committee members, banishement for stuffing ballot-boxes to secure merely a local advantage by the success of a ward ticket.  Straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel never had more conspicuous illustration.  And the burning fact remains incredible that among the members of the Executive Committee were some who had themselves obtained office by bribery and corruption, by calling into play the stuffing of ballot-boxes, and by all the wicked and infamous means which were at that time practiced.  Another member was, as I have stated before, a felon who had served his time in the Ohio State Prison; another, still living and a highly respectable church member who professes holy horror of fraud, had in early years colluded with his brother to get possession of valuable wharf property, of which the brother was agent and care-taker by appointment of the owner, who had returned to his home in the East, to be gone a year.  The scheme of these brothers was a fraud of villainous conception, but