ns of Great Britain, who take up their cause, can comprehend,
but which in effect and operation leave them unprotected, and render
those who oppress them secure in their spoils, they must think still
worse of British justice than of the arbitrary power of the Company's
servants which hath been exercised to their destruction. They will be
forever, what for the greater part they have hitherto been, inclined to
compromise with the corruption of the magistrates, as a screen against
that violence from which the laws afford them no redress.

For these reasons your Committee did and do strongly contend that the
Court of Parliament ought to be open with great facility to the
production of all evidence, except that which the precedents of
Parliament teach them authoritatively to reject, or which hath no sort
of natural aptitude directly or circumstantially to prove the case. They
have been and are invariably of opinion that the Lords ought _to
enlarge, and not to contrast, the rules of evidence, according to the
nature and difficulties of the case_, for redress to the injured, for
the punishment of oppression, for the detection of fraud,--and above
all, to prevent, what is the greatest dishonor to all laws and to all
tribunals, the failure of justice. To prevent the last of these evils
all courts in this and all countries have constantly made all their
maxims and principles concerning testimony to conform; although such
courts have been bound undoubtedly by stricter rules, both of form and
of prescript cases, than the sovereign jurisdiction exercised by the
Lords on the impeachment of the Commons ever has been or ever ought to
be. Therefore your Committee doth totally reject any rules by which the
practice of any inferior court is affirmed as a directory guide to an
higher, especially where the forms and the powers of the judicature are
different, and the objects of judicial inquiry are not the same.

Your Committee conceives that the trial of a cause is not in the
arguments or disputations of the prosecutors and the counsel, but in
_the evidence_, and that to refuse evidence is to refuse to hear the
cause: nothing, therefore, but the most clear and weighty reasons ought
to preclude its production. Your Committee conceives, that, when
evidence on the face of it relevant, that is, connected with the party
and the charge, was denied to be competent, _the burden lay upon those
who opposed it_ to set forth the authorities, whether o