practice of any inferior court is affirmed as a directory guide to an
higher, especially where the forms and the powers of the judicature are
different, and the objects of judicial inquiry are not the same.

Your Committee conceives that the trial of a cause is not in the
arguments or disputations of the prosecutors and the counsel, but in
_the evidence_, and that to refuse evidence is to refuse to hear the
cause: nothing, therefore, but the most clear and weighty reasons ought
to preclude its production. Your Committee conceives, that, when
evidence on the face of it relevant, that is, connected with the party
and the charge, was denied to be competent, _the burden lay upon those
who opposed it_ to set forth the authorities, whether of positive
statute, known recognized maxims and principles of law, passages in an
accredited institute, code, digest, or systematic treatise of laws, or
some adjudged cases, wherein, the courts have rejected evidence of that
nature. No such thing ever (except in one instance, to which we shall
hereafter speak) was produced at the bar, nor (that we know of) produced
by the Lords in their debates, or by the Judges in the opinions by them
delivered. Therefore, for anything which as yet appears to your
Committee to the contrary, these responses and decisions were, in many
of the points, not the determinations of any law whatsoever, but mere
arbitrary decrees, to which we could not without solemn protestation,
submit.

Your Committee, at an early period, and frequently since the
commencement of this trial, have neglected no means of research which
might afford them information concerning these supposed strict and
inflexible rules of proceeding and of evidence, which, appeared to them,
destructive of all the means and ends of justice: and, first, they
examined carefully the Rolls and Journals of the House of Lords, as also