This determined and systematic privacy was the more alarming to your
Committee, because the questions did not (except in that case) originate
from the Lords for the direction 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