Your Committee, using their best diligence, have never been able to form
a clear opinion upon the ground and principle of these decisions. The
mere result, upon each case decided by the Lords, furnished them with no
light, from any principle, precedent, or foregone authority of law or
reason, to guide them with regard to the next matter of evidence which
they had to offer, or to discriminate what matter ought to be urged or
to be set aside: your Committee not being able to divine whether the
particular evidence, which, upon a conjectural principle, they might
choose to abandon, would not appear to this House, and to the judging
world at large, to be admissible, and possibly decisive proof. In these
straits, they had and have no choice, but either wholly to abandon the
prosecution, and of consequence to betray the trust reposed in them by
this House, or to bring forward such matter of evidence as they are
furnished with from sure sources of authenticity, and which in their
judgment, aided by the best advice they could obtain, is possessed of a
moral aptitude juridically to prove or to illustrate the case which the
House had given them, in charge.
MODE OF PUTTING THE QUESTIONS.
When your Committee came to examine into those private opinions of the
Judges, they found, to their no small concern, that the mode both of
putting the questions to the Judges, and their answers, was still more
unusual and unprecedented than the privacy with which those questions
were given and resolved.
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