course of the Court, and the course of the Court is the law of the
Court."[34]

Your Managers were convinced that one of the principal reasons for which
this cause was brought into Parliament was the danger that in inferior
courts their rule would be formed naturally upon their ordinary
experience, and the exigencies of the cases which in ordinary course
came before them. This experience, and the exigencies of these cases,
extend little further than the concerns of a people comparatively in a
narrow vicinage, a people of the same or nearly the same language,
religion, manners, laws, and habits: with them an intercourse of every
kind was easy.

These rules of law in most cases, and the practice of the courts in all,
could not be easily applicable to a people separated from Great Britain
by a very great part of the globe,--separated by manners, by principles
of religion, and of inveterate habits as strong as nature itself, still
more than by the circumstance of local distance. Such confined and
inapplicable rules would be convenient, indeed, to oppression, to
extortion, bribery, and corruption, but ruinous to the people, whose
protection is the true object of all tribunals and of all their rules.
Even English judges in India, who have been sufficiently tenacious of
what they considered as the rules of English courts, were obliged in
many points, and particularly with regard to evidence, to relax very
considerably, as the civil and politic government has been obliged to do
in several other cases, on account of insuperable difficulties arising
from a great diversity of manners, and from what may be considered as a
diversity even in the very constitution of their minds,--instances of
which your Committee will subjoin in a future Appendix.