Their reasons we can only conjecture. But your Managers,
acting for this House, were not the less bound to see that the due
Parliamentary course should be pursued, even when it is most favorable
to those whom they impeach. If it should answer the purposes of one
prisoner to waive the rights which belong to all prisoners, it was the
duty of your Managers to protect those general rights against that
particular prisoner. It was still more their duty to endeavor that their
_own_ questions should not be erroneously stated, or cases put which
varied from those which they argued, or opinions given in a manner not
supported by the spirit of our laws and institutions or by analogy with
the practice of all our courts.
Your Committee, much in the dark about a matter in which it was so
necessary that they should receive every light, have heard, that, in
debating this matter abroad, it has been objected, that many of the
precedents on which we most relied were furnished in the courts of the
Lord High Steward, and not in trials where the Peers were Judges,--and
that the Lord High Steward not having it in his power to retire with the
juror Peers, the Judges' opinions, from necessity, not from equity to
the parties, were given before that magistrate.
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