Opening speeches and summing up by the defendant’s counsel, and defendant’s addresses to the Court 22

Documentary and oral evidence on the part of the
defendant 23
                                                    ——­
          
                                           118

The other head, namely, that the trial has occupied one hundred and eighteen days, or nearly one third of a year.  This your Committee conceives to have arisen from the following immediate causes.  First, the nature and extent of the matter to be tried.  Secondly, the general nature and quality of the evidence produced:  it was principally documentary evidence, contained in papers of great length, the whole of which was often required to be read when brought to prove a single short fact.  Under the head of evidence must be taken into consideration the number and description of the witnesses examined and cross-examined.  Thirdly, and principally, the duration of the trial is to be attributed to objections taken by the prisoner’s counsel to the admissibility of several documents and persons offered as evidence on the part of the prosecution.  These objections amounted to sixty-two:  they gave rise to several debates, and to twelve references from the Court to the Judges.  On the part of the Managers, the number of objections was small; the debates upon them were short; there was not upon them any reference to the Judges; and the Lords did not even retire upon any of them to the Chamber of Parliament.

This last cause of the number of sitting days your Committee considers as far more important than all the rest.  The questions upon the admissibility of evidence, the manner in which these questions were stated and were decided, the modes of proceeding, the great uncertainty of the principle upon which evidence in that court is to be admitted or rejected,—­all these appear to your Committee materially to affect the constitution of the House of Peers as a court of judicature, as well as its powers, and the purposes it was intended to answer in the state.  The Peers have a valuable interest in the conservation of their own lawful privileges.  But this interest is not confined to the Lords.  The Commons ought to partake in the advantage of the judicial rights and privileges of that high court.  Courts are made for the suitors, and not the suitors for the court.  The conservation of all other parts of the law, the whole indeed of the rights and liberties of the subject, ultimately depends upon the preservation of the Law of Parliament in its original force and authority.

Your Committee had reason to entertain apprehensions that certain proceedings in this trial may possibly limit and weaken the means of carrying on any future impeachment of the Commons.  As your Committee felt these apprehensions strongly, they thought it their duty to begin with humbly submitting facts and observations on the proceedings concerning evidence to the consideration of this House, before they proceed to state the other matters which come within the scope of the directions which they have received.