s to
be established, with relation to the law and rule of evidence, which
tended in their opinion to shut up forever all the avenues to justice.
They were not to consider a rule of evidence as a means of concealment.
They were not, without a struggle, to suffer any subtleties to prevail
which would render a process in Parliament, not the terror, but the
protection, of all the fraud and violence arising from the abuse of
British power in the East. Accordingly, your Managers contended with all
their might, as their predecessors in the same place had contended with
more ability and learning, but not with more zeal and more firmness,
against those dangerous innovations, as they were successively
introduced: they held themselves bound constantly to protest, and in one
or two instances they did protest, in discourses of considerable length,
against those private, and, for what they could find, unargued judicial
opinions, which must, as they fear, introduce by degrees the miserable
servitude which exists where the law is uncertain or unknown.

DEBATES ON EVIDENCE.

The chief debates at the bar, and the decisions of the Judges, (which we
find in all cases implicitly adopted, in all their extent and without
qualification, by the Lords,) turned upon _evidence_. Your Committee,
before the trial began, were apprised, by discourses which prudence did
not permit them to neglect, that endeavors would be used to embarrass
them in their proceedings by exceptions against evidence; that the
judgments and opinions of the courts below would be resorted to on this
subject; that there the rules of evidence were precise, rigorous, and
inflexible; and that the counsel for the criminal would endeavor to
introduce the same rules, with the same severity and exactness, into
this trial. Your Committee were fully assured, and were resolved
strenuously to contend, that no doctrine or rule of law, much less the
practice of any court, ought to have weight or authority in Parliament,
further than as such doctrine, rule, or practice is agreeable to the
proceedings in Parliament, or hath received the sanction of approved
precedent there, or is founded on the immutable principles of
substantial justice, without which, your Committee readily agrees, no
practice in any court, high or low, is proper or fit to be maintained.

In this preference of the rules observed in the High Court of
Parliament, preeminently superior to all the rest, there is no claim
m