In this preference of the rules observed in the High Court of Parliament, preeminently superior to all the rest, there is no claim made which the inferior courts do not make, each with regard to itself.  It is well known that the rules of proceedings in these courts vary, and some of them very essentially; yet the usage of each court is the law of the court, and it would be vain to object to any rule in any court, that it is not the rule of another court.  For instance:  as a general rule, the Court of King’s Bench, on trials by jury, cannot receive depositions, but must judge by testimony viva voce.  The rule of the Court of Chancery is not only not the same, but it is the reverse, and Lord Hardwicke ruled accordingly.  “The constant and established proceedings of this Court,” said this great magistrate, “are on written evidence, like the proceedings on the Civil and Canon Law.  This is the course of the Court, and the course of the Court is the law of the Court."[34]

Your Managers were convinced that one of the principal reasons for which this cause was brought into Parliament was the danger that in inferior courts their rule would be formed naturally upon their ordinary experience, and the exigencies of the cases which in ordinary course came before them.  This experience, and the exigencies of these cases, extend little further than the concerns of a people comparatively in a narrow vicinage, a people of the same or nearly the same language, religion, manners, laws, and habits:  with them an intercourse of every kind was easy.

These rules of law in most cases, and the practice of the courts in all, could not be easily applicable to a people separated from Great Britain by a very great part of the globe,—­separated by manners, by principles of religion, and of inveterate habits as strong as nature itself, still more than by the circumstance of local distance.  Such confined and inapplicable rules would be convenient, indeed, to oppression, to extortion, bribery, and corruption, but ruinous to the people, whose protection is the true object of all tribunals and of all their rules.  Even English judges in India, who have been sufficiently tenacious of what they considered as the rules of English courts, were obliged in many points, and particularly with regard to evidence, to relax very considerably, as the civil and politic government has been obliged to do in several other cases, on account of insuperable difficulties arising from a great diversity of manners, and from what may be considered as a diversity even in the very constitution of their minds,—­instances of which your Committee will subjoin in a future Appendix.