of law, with a punctilious exactness: and this seems to have been the
course which laws have taken in every nation.[50] It was probably from
this rigor, and from a sense of its pressure, that, at an early period
of our law, far more causes of criminal jurisdiction were carried into
the House of Lords and the Council Board, where laymen were judges, than
can or ought to be at present.

As the business of courts of equity became more enlarged and more
methodical,--as magistrates, for a long series of years, presided in the
Court of Chancery, who were not bred to the Common Law,--as commerce,
with its advantages and its necessities, opened a communication more
largely with other countries,--as the Law of Nature and Nations (always
a part of the law of England) came to be cultivated,--as an increasing
empire, as new views and new combinations of things were opened,--this
antique rigor and overdone severity gave way to the accommodation of
human concerns, for which rules were made, and not human concerns to
bend to them.

At length, Lord Hardwicke, in one of the cases the most solemnly argued,
that has been in man's memory, with the aid of the greatest learning at
the bar, and with the aid of all the learning on the bench, both bench
and bar being then supplied with men of the first form, declared from
the bench, and in concurrence with the rest of the Judges, and with the
most learned of the long robe, the able council on the side of the old
restrictive principles making no reclamation, "that the judges and sages
of the law have laid it down that there is but ONE general rule of
evidence,--_the best that the nature of the case will admit_."[51] This,
then, the master rule, that governs all the subordinate rules, does in
reality subject itself and its own virtue and authority _to the nature
of the case_, and leaves no rule at all of an independent, abstract, and