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 choose to abandon, would not appear to this House, and to the judging world at large, to be admissible, and possibly decisive proof.  In these straits, they had and have no choice, but either wholly to abandon the prosecution, and of consequence to betray the trust reposed in them by this House, or to bring forward such matter of evidence as they are furnished with from sure sources of authenticity, and which in their judgment, aided by the best advice they could obtain, is possessed of a moral aptitude juridically to prove or to illustrate the case which the House had given them, in charge.

MODE OF PUTTING THE QUESTIONS.

When your Committee came to examine into those private opinions of the Judges, they found, to their no small concern, that the mode both of putting the questions to the Judges, and their answers, was still more unusual and unprecedented than the privacy with which those questions were given and resolved.

This mode strikes, as we apprehend, at the vital privileges of the House.  For, with the single exception of the first question put to the Judges in 1788, the case being stated, the questions are raised directly, specifically, and by name, on those privileges:  that is, What evidence is it competent for the Managers of the House of Commons to produce? We conceive that it was not proper, nor justified by a single precedent, to refer to the Judges of the inferior courts any question, and still less for them to decide in their answer, of what is or is not competent for the House of Commons, or for any committee acting under their authority, to do or not to do, in any instance or respect whatsoever.  This new and unheard-of course can have no other effect than to subject to the discretion of the Judges the Law of Parliament and the privileges of the House of Commons, and in a great measure the judicial privileges of the Peers themselves:  any intermeddling in which on their part we conceive to be a dangerous and unwarrantable assumption of power.  It is contrary to what has been declared by Lord Coke himself, in a passage before quoted, to be the duty of the Judges,—­and to what the Judges of former times have confessed to be their duty, on occasions to which he refers in the time of Henry VI.  And we are of opinion that the conduct of those sages of the law, and others their successors, who have been thus diffident and