adherence to the forms and rules of English practice, in others was
framed upon principles perhaps too remote from the constitution of
English tribunals. By the usual course of English practice, the far
greater part of the redress to be obtained against oppressions of power
is by process in the nature of civil actions. In these a trial by jury
is a necessary part, with regard to the finding the offence and to the
assessment of the damages. Both these were in the charter of justice
left entirely to the judges. It was presumed, and not wholly without
reason, that the British subjects were liable to fall into factions and
combinations, in order to support themselves in the abuses of an
authority of which every man might in his turn become a sharer. And with
regard to the natives, it was presumed (perhaps a little too hastily)
that they were not capable of sharing in the functions of jurors. But it
was not foreseen that the judges were also liable to be engaged in the
factions of the settlement,--and if they should ever happen to be so
engaged, that the native people were then without that remedy which
obviously lay in the chance that the court and jury, though both liable
to bias, might not easily unite in the same identical act of injustice.
Your Committee, on full inquiry, are of opinion _that the use of juries
is neither impracticable nor dangerous in Bengal_.

Your Committee refer to their report made in the year 1781, for the
manner in which this court, attempting to extend its jurisdiction, and
falling with extreme severity on the native magistrates, a violent
contest arose between the English judges and the English civil
authority. This authority, calling in the military arm, (by a most
dangerous example,) overpowered, and for a while suspended, the
functions of the court; but at length those functions, which were
suspended by the quarrel of the parties, were destroyed by their
reconciliation, and by the arrangements made in consequence of it. By