a
Parliamentary proceeding to the technical subtilties of the inferior
courts. Secondly, that the question put to the Judges, and their answer,
were strictly confined to the law and practice below; and that nothing
in either had a tendency to their delivering an opinion concerning
Parliament, its laws, its usages, its course of proceeding, or its
powers. Thirdly, that the motion in arrest of judgment, grounded on the
opinion of the Judges, was made only by Dr. Sacheverell himself, and not
by his counsel, men of great skill and learning, who, if they thought
the objections had any weight, would undoubtedly have made and argued
them.

Here, as in the case of the 11th King Richard II., the Judges declared
unanimously, that such an objection would be fatal to such a pleading in
any indictment or information; but the Lords, as on the former occasion,
overruled this objection, and held the article to be good and valid,
notwithstanding the report of the Judges concerning the mode of
proceeding in the courts below.

Your Committee finds that a protest, with reasons at large, was entered
by several lords against this determination of their court.[9] It is
always an advantage to those who protest, that their reasons appear upon
record; whilst the reasons of the majority, who determine the question,
do not appear. This would be a disadvantage of such importance as
greatly to impair, if not totally to destroy, the effect of precedent as
authority, if the reasons which prevailed were not justly presumed to be
more valid than those which have been obliged to give way: the former
having governed the final and conclusive decision of a competent court.
But your Committee, combining the fact of this decision with the early
decision just quoted, and with the total absence of any precedent of an
objection, before that time or since, allowed to pleading, or what has
any relation to the rules and principles of pleading, as used in
Westminster Hall, has no doubt that the House of Lords was governed in
the 9th of Anne by the very same principles which it had solemnly
declared in the 11th of Richard II.

But besides the presumption in favor of the reasons which must be
supposed to have produced this solemn judgment of the Peers, contrary to
the practice of the courts below, as declared by all the Judges, it is
probable that the Lords were unwilling to take a step which might admit
that anything in that practice should be received as their r