ngs or to the rights of the Commons acting
as accusers for the whole commons of Great Britain in that court, or why
the Judges should be less reserved in deciding upon any of these points
of high Parliamentary privilege, than the Judges of that and the
preceding periods. This present case is a proceeding in full Parliament,
and not like the case under the commission in the time of James II., and
still more evidently out of the province of Judges in the inferior
courts.

All the precedents previous to the trial of Warren Hastings, Esquire,
seem to your Committee to be uniform. The Judges had constantly refused
to give an opinion on any of the powers, privileges, or competencies of
either House. But in the present instance your Committee has found, with
great concern, a further matter of innovation. Hitherto the constant
practice has been to put questions to the Judges but in the three
following ways: as, 1st, A question of pure abstract law, without
reference to any case, or merely upon an A.B. case stated to them; 2dly,
To the legal construction of some act of Parliament; 3dly, To report the
course of proceeding in the courts below upon an abstract case. Besides
these three, your Committee knows not of a single example of any sort,
during the course of any judicial proceeding at the bar of the House of
Lords, whether the prosecution has been by indictment, by information
from the Attorney-General, or by impeachment of the House of Commons.

In the present trial, the Judges appear to your Committee not to have
given their judgment on points of law, stated as such, but to have in
effect tried the cause, in the whole course of it,--with one instance to
the contrary.

The Lords have stated no question of general law, no question on the
construction of an act of Parliament, no question concerning the
practice of the courts below. _They put the whole gross case and matter
in question, with all its circumstances, to the Judges._ They have, _for
the first time_, demanded of them what particular person, paper, or
document ought or ought not to be produced before them by the Managers
for the Commons of Great Britain: for instance, whether, under such an
article, the Bengal Consultations of such a day, the examination of
Rajah Nundcomar, and the like. The operation of this method is in
substance not only to make the Judges masters of the whole process and
conduct of the trial, but through that medium to transfer to them the
ult