This final and independent judicature, because it is final and independent, ought to be very cautious with regard to the rejection of evidence.  If incompetent evidence is received by them, there is nothing to hinder their judging upon it afterwards according to its value:  it may have no weight in their judgment.  But if, upon advice of others, they previously reject information necessary to their proper judgment, they have no intermediate means of setting themselves right, and they injure the cause of justice without any remedy.  Against errors of juries there is remedy by a new trial.  Against errors of judges there is remedy, in civil causes, by demurrer and bills of exceptions; against their final mistake there is remedy by writ of error, in courts of Common Law.  In Chancery there is a remedy by appeal.  If they wilfully err in the rejection of evidence, there was formerly the terror existing of punishment by impeachment of the Commons.  But with regard to the Lords, there is no remedy for error, no punishment for a wilful wrong.

Your Committee conceives it not improbable that this apparently total and unreserved submission of the Lords to the dictates of the judges of the inferior courts (no proper judges, in any light or in any degree, of the Law of Parliament) may be owing to the very few causes of original jurisdiction, and the great multitude of those of appellate jurisdiction, which come before them.  In cases of appeal, or of error, (which is in the nature of an appeal,) the court of appeal is obliged to judge, not by its own rules, acting in another capacity, or by those which it shall choose pro re nata to make, but by the rules of the inferior court from whence the appeal comes.  For the fault or the mistake of the inferior judge is, that he has not proceeded, as he ought to do, according to the law which he was to administer; and the correction, if such shall take place, is to compel the court from whence the appeal comes to act as originally it ought to have acted, according to law, as the law ought to have been understood and practised in that tribunal.  The Lords, in such cases of necessity, judge on the grounds of the law and practice of the courts below; and this they can very rarely learn with precision, but from the body of the Judges.  Of course much deference is and ought to be had to their opinions.  But by this means a confusion may arise (if not well guarded against) between what they do in their appellate jurisdiction, which is frequent, and what they ought to do in their original jurisdiction, which is rare; and by this the whole original jurisdiction of the Peers, and the whole law and usage of Parliament, at least in their virtue and spirit, may be considerably impaired.

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After having thus submitted to the House the general tenor of the proceedings in this trial, your Committee will, with all convenient speed, lay before the House the proceedings on each head of evidence separately which has been rejected; and this they hope will put the House more perfectly in possession of the principal causes of the length of this trial, as well as of the injury which Parliamentary justice may, in their opinion, suffer from those proceedings.