the doctors; and as it is the most generally received, so it is most agreeable to reason."[72] And in another chapter, relative to the ordinary criminal process by a private prosecutor, he lays it down, on the authority of Angelus, Bartolus, and others, that, after the right of the party prosecuting is expired, the judge, taking up the matter ex officio, may direct new witnesses and new proofs, even after publication.[73] Other passages from the same writer and from others might be added; but your Committee trusts that what they have produced is sufficient to show the general principles of the Imperial Criminal Law.

The High Court of Parliament bears in its modes of proceeding a much greater resemblance to the course of the Court of Chancery, the Admiralty, and Ecclesiastical Courts, (which are the King’s courts too, and their law the law of the land,) than to those of the Common Law.  The accusation is brought into Parliament, at this very day, by exhibiting articles; which your Committee is informed is the regular mode of commencing a criminal prosecution, where the office of the judge is promoted, in the Civil and Canon Law courts of this country.  The answer, again, is usually specific, both to the fact and the law alleged in each particular article; which is agreeable to the proceeding of the Civil Law, and not of the Common Law.

Anciently the resemblance was much nearer and stronger.  Selden, who was himself a great ornament of the Common Law, and who was personally engaged in most of the impeachments of his time, has written expressly on the judicature in Parliament.  In his fourth chapter, intituled, Of Witnesses, he lays down the practice of his time, as well as of ancient times, with respect to the proof by examination; and it is clearly a practice more similar to that of the Civil than the Common Law.  “The practice at this day,” says he, “is to swear the witnesses in open House, and then to examine them there, or at a committee, either upon interrogatories agreed upon in the House, or such as the committee in their discretion shall demand.  Thus it was in ancient times, as shall appear by the precedents, so many as they are, they being very sparing to record those ceremonies, which I shall briefly recite:  I then add those of later times.”

Accordingly, in times so late as those of the trial of Lord Middlesex,[74] upon an impeachment of the Commons, the whole course of the proceeding, especially in the mode of adducing the evidence, was in a manner the same as in the Civil Law:  depositions were taken, and publication regularly passed:  and on the trial of Lord Strafford, both modes pointed out by Selden seem to have been indifferently used.