from the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, one of whose principal functions and duties it is to be observant of the courts of justice, and to take due care that none of them, from the lowest to the highest, shall pursue new courses, unknown to the laws and constitution, of this kingdom, or to equity, sound legal policy, or substantial justice.  Your Committee were not sent into Westminster Hall for the purpose of contributing in their persons, and under the authority of the House, to change the course or law of Parliament, which had continued unquestioned for at least four hundred years.  Neither was it any part of their mission to suffer precedents to be established, with relation to the law and rule of evidence, which tended in their opinion to shut up forever all the avenues to justice.  They were not to consider a rule of evidence as a means of concealment.  They were not, without a struggle, to suffer any subtleties to prevail which would render a process in Parliament, not the terror, but the protection, of all the fraud and violence arising from the abuse of British power in the East.  Accordingly, your Managers contended with all their might, as their predecessors in the same place had contended with more ability and learning, but not with more zeal and more firmness, against those dangerous innovations, as they were successively introduced:  they held themselves bound constantly to protest, and in one or two instances they did protest, in discourses of considerable length, against those private, and, for what they could find, unargued judicial opinions, which must, as they fear, introduce by degrees the miserable servitude which exists where the law is uncertain or unknown.

DEBATES ON EVIDENCE.

The chief debates at the bar, and the decisions of the Judges, (which we find in all cases implicitly adopted, in all their extent and without qualification, by the Lords,) turned upon evidence.  Your Committee, before the trial began, were apprised, by discourses which prudence did not permit them to neglect, that endeavors would be used to embarrass them in their proceedings by exceptions against evidence; that the judgments and opinions of the courts below would be resorted to on this subject; that there the rules of evidence were precise, rigorous, and inflexible; and that the counsel for the criminal would endeavor to introduce the same rules, with the same severity and exactness, into this trial.  Your Committee were fully assured, and were resolved strenuously to contend, that no doctrine or rule of law, much less the practice of any court, ought to have weight or authority in Parliament, further than as such doctrine, rule, or practice is agreeable to the proceedings in Parliament, or hath received the sanction of approved precedent there, or is founded on the immutable principles of substantial justice, without which, your Committee readily agrees, no practice in any court, high or low, is proper or fit to be maintained.