Nature
Vigilance committees, by their nature, lacked an outside set of checks and balances, leaving them open for excesses and abuse.
In the West, the speed of the vigilance committees and lack of safeguards sometimes led to the innocent being hanged or to their just disappearing. A few committees were taken over by fraudulent individuals seeking profit or political office.
Read more about this topic: Vigilance Committee
Famous quotes containing the word nature:
“For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)