assembled, one of whose principal functions and duties it is to be
observant of the courts of justice, and to take due care that none of
them, from the lowest to the highest, shall pursue new courses, unknown
to the laws and constitution, of this kingdom, or to equity, sound legal
policy, or substantial justice. Your Committee were not sent into
Westminster Hall for the purpose of contributing in their persons, and
under the authority of the House, to change the course or law of
Parliament, which had continued unquestioned for at least four hundred
years. Neither was it any part of their mission to suffer precedents 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