rection of their own conscience. These
questions, in some material instances, were not made or allowed by the
parties at the bar, nor settled in open court, but differed materially
from what your Managers contended was the true state of the question, as
put and argued by them. They were such as the Lords thought proper to
state for them. Strong remonstrances produced some alteration in this
particular; but even after these remonstrances, several questions were
made on statements which the Managers never made nor admitted.

Your Committee does not know of any precedent before this, in which the
Peers, on a proposal of the Commons, or of a less weighty person before
their court, to have the cases publicly referred to the Judges, and
their arguments and resolutions delivered in their presence, absolutely
refused. The very few precedents of such private reference on trials
have been made, as we have observed already, _sub silentio_, and without
any observation from the parties. In the precedents we produce, the
determination is accompanied with its reasons, and the publicity is
considered as the clear, undoubted right of the parties.

Your Committee, using their best diligence, have never been able to form
a clear opinion upon the ground and principle of these decisions. The
mere result, upon each case decided by the Lords, furnished them with no
light, from any principle, precedent, or foregone authority of law or
reason, to guide them with regard to the next matter of evidence which
they had to offer, or to discriminate what matter ought to be urged or
to be set aside: your Committee not being able to divine whether the
particular evidence, which, upon a conjectural principle, they might
choose to abandon, would not appear to this House, and to the judging
world at large, to be admissible, and possibly decisive proof. In these
straits, they had and have no choice, but either wholly to abandon the
prosecution, and of consequence to betray the trust reposed in them by
this House, or to bring forward such matter of evidence as they are
furnished with from sure sources of authenticity, and which in their
judgment, aided by the best advice they could obtain, is possessed of a
moral aptitude juridically to prove or to illustrate the case which the
House had given them, in charge.

MODE OF PUTTING THE QUESTIONS.

When your Committee came to examine into those private opinions of the
Judges, they found, to their no small con