f positive
statute, known recognized maxims and principles of law, passages in an
accredited institute, code, digest, or systematic treatise of laws, or
some adjudged cases, wherein, the courts have rejected evidence of that
nature. No such thing ever (except in one instance, to which we shall
hereafter speak) was produced at the bar, nor (that we know of) produced
by the Lords in their debates, or by the Judges in the opinions by them
delivered. Therefore, for anything which as yet appears to your
Committee to the contrary, these responses and decisions were, in many
of the points, not the determinations of any law whatsoever, but mere
arbitrary decrees, to which we could not without solemn protestation,
submit.

Your Committee, at an early period, and frequently since the
commencement of this trial, have neglected no means of research which
might afford them information concerning these supposed strict and
inflexible rules of proceeding and of evidence, which, appeared to them,
destructive of all the means and ends of justice: and, first, they
examined carefully the Rolls and Journals of the House of Lords, as also
the printed trials of cases before that court.

Your Committee finds but one instance, in the whole course of
Parliamentary impeachments, in which evidence offered by the Commons has
been rejected on the plea of inadmissibility or incompetence. This was
in the case of Lord Strafford's trial; when the copy of a warrant (the
same not having any attestation to authenticate it as a true copy) was,
on deliberation, not admitted,--and your Committee thinks, as the case
stood, with reason. But even in this one instance the Lords seemed to
show a marked anxiety not to narrow too much the admissibility of
evidence; for they confined their determination "to this individual
case," as the Lord Steward reported their resolution; and he
adds,--"They conceive this could be no impediment or failure in the
proceeding, because the truth and verity of it would depend on the first
general power given to execute it, which they who manage the evidence
for the Commons say they could prove."[36] Neither have objections to
evidence offered by the prisoner been very frequently made, nor often
allowed when made. In the same case of Lord Strafford, two books
produced by his Lordship, without proof by whom they were written, were
rejected, (and on a clear principle,) "as being private books, and no
records."[37] On both these occasio