Another great cause why your Committee conceived this House had chosen to proceed in the High Court of Parliament was because the inferior courts were habituated, with very few exceptions, to try men for the abuse only of their individual and natural powers, which can extend but a little way.[35] Before them, offences, whether of fraud or violence or both, are, for much the greater part, charged upon persons of mean and obscure condition.  Those unhappy persons are so far from being supported by men of rank and influence, that the whole weight and force of the community is directed against them.  In this case, they are in general objects of protection as well as of punishment; and the course perhaps ought, as it is commonly said to be, not to suffer anything to be applied to their conviction beyond what the strictest rules will permit.  But in the cause which your Managers have in charge the circumstances are the very reverse to what happens in the cases of mere personal delinquency which come before the [inferior] courts.  These courts have not before them persons who act, and who justify their acts, by the nature of a despotical and arbitrary power.  The abuses stated in our impeachment are not those of mere individual, natural faculties, but the abuses of civil and political authority.  The offence is that of one who has carried with him, in the perpetration of his crimes, whether of violence or of fraud, the whole force of the state,—­who, in the perpetration and concealment of offences, has had the advantage of all the means and powers given to government for the detection and punishment of guilt and for the protection of the people.  The people themselves, on whose behalf the Commons of Great Britain take up this remedial and protecting prosecution, are naturally timid.  Their spirits are broken by the arbitrary power usurped over them, and claimed by the delinquent as his law.  They are ready to flatter the power which they dread.  They are apt to look for favor [from their governors] by covering those vices in the predecessor which they fear the successor may be disposed to imitate.  They have reason to consider complaints as means, not of redress, but of aggravation to their sufferings; and when they shall ultimately hear that the nature of the British laws and the rules of its tribunals are such as by no care or study either they, or even the Commons of Great Britain, who take up their cause, can comprehend, but which in effect and operation leave them unprotected, and render those who oppress them secure in their spoils, they must think still worse of British justice than of the arbitrary power of the Company’s servants which hath been exercised to their destruction.  They will be forever, what for the greater part they have hitherto been, inclined to compromise with the corruption of the magistrates, as a screen against that violence from which the laws afford them no redress.