cause secret crimes, such as secret assassination, poisoning, bribery,
peculation, and extortion, (the three last of which this House has
charged upon Mr. Hastings,) can very rarely be proved in any other way.
That way of proof is made to give satisfaction to a searching,
equitable, and intelligent mind; and there must not be a failure of
justice. Lord Mansfield has said that he did not know a case in which
proof might not be supplied.[69]

Your Committee has resorted to the trial of Donellan, and they have and
do much rely upon it, first, on account of the known learning and
ability of the judge who tried the cause, and the particular attention
he has paid to the subject of evidence, which forms a book in his
treatise on _Nisi Prius_;--next, because, as the trial went _wholly_ on
circumstantial evidence, the proceedings in it furnish some of the most
complete and the fullest examples on that subject;--thirdly, because the
case is recent, and the law cannot be supposed to be materially altered
since the time of that event.

Comparing the proceedings on that trial, and the doctrines from the
bench, with the doctrines we have heard from the woolsack, your
Committee cannot comprehend how they can be reconciled. For the Lords
compelled the Managers to declare for what purpose they produced each
separate member of their circumstantial evidence: a thing, as we
conceive, not usual, and particularly not observed in the trial of
Donellan. We have observed in that trial, and in most others which we
have had occasion to resort to, that the prosecutor is suffered to
proceed narratively and historically, without interruption. If, indeed,
it appears on the face of the narration that what is represented to have
been said, written, or done did not come to the knowledge of the
prisoner, a question sometimes, but rarely, has been asked, whether the
prisoner could be affected with the knowledge of it. When a connection
with the person of the prisoner has been in any way shown, or even
promised to be shown, the evidence is allowed to go on without further
opposition. The sending of a sealed letter,--the receipt of a sealed
letter, inferred from the delivery to the prisoner's servant,--the bare
possession of a paper written by any other person, on the presumption
that the contents of such letters or such paper were known to the
prisoner,--and the being present when anything was said or done, on the
presumption of his seeing or hearing what