effect, might be added; we
shall only remark shortly, that Gaill, a writer on the practice of that
law the most frequently cited in our own courts, gives the rule more in
the form of a maxim,--"that the law is contented with such proof as
_can_ be made, if the subject _in its nature_ is difficult of
proof."[48] And the same writer, in another passage, refers to another
still more general maxim, (and a sound maxim it is,) that the power and
means of proof ought not to be narrowed, but enlarged, that the truth
may not be concealed: "_Probationum facultas non angustari, sed ampliari
debeat, ne veritas occultetur._"[49]

On the whole, your Committee can find nothing in the writings of the
learned in this law, any more than they could discover anything in the
Law of Parliament, to support any one of the determinations given by the
Judges, and adopted by the Lords, against the evidence which your
Committee offered, whether direct and positive, or merely (as for the
greater part it was) circumstantial, and produced as a ground to form
legitimate presumption against the defendant: nor, if they were to admit
(which they do not) this Civil Law to be of authority in furnishing any
rule in an impeachment of the Commons, more than as it may occasionally
furnish a principle of reason on a new or undetermined point, do they
find any rule or any principle, derived from that law, which could or
ought to have made us keep back the evidence which we offered; on the
contrary, we rather think those rules and principles to be in agreement
with our conduct.

As to the Canon Law, your Committee, finding it to have adopted the
Civil Law with no very essential variation, does not feel it necessary
to make any particular statement on that subject.

Your Committee then came to examine into the authorities in the English
law, both as it has prevailed for many years back, and as it has been
recently received in our courts below. They found on the whole the rules
rather less strict, more liberal, and less loaded with positive
limitations, than in the Roman law. The origin of this latitude may
perhaps be sought in this circumstance, which we know to have relaxed
the rigor of the Roman law: courts in England do not judge upon
evidence, _secundum allegata et probata_, as in other countries and
under other laws they do, but upon verdict. By a fiction of law they
consider the jury as supplying, in some sense, the place of testimony.
One witness (and fo