Accordingly, your Managers contended with all
their might, as their predecessors in the same place had contended with
more ability and learning, but not with more zeal and more firmness,
against those dangerous innovations, as they were successively
introduced: they held themselves bound constantly to protest, and in one
or two instances they did protest, in discourses of considerable length,
against those private, and, for what they could find, unargued judicial
opinions, which must, as they fear, introduce by degrees the miserable
servitude which exists where the law is uncertain or unknown.
DEBATES ON EVIDENCE.
The chief debates at the bar, and the decisions of the Judges, (which we
find in all cases implicitly adopted, in all their extent and without
qualification, by the Lords,) turned upon _evidence_. Your Committee,
before the trial began, were apprised, by discourses which prudence did
not permit them to neglect, that endeavors would be used to embarrass
them in their proceedings by exceptions against evidence; that the
judgments and opinions of the courts below would be resorted to on this
subject; that there the rules of evidence were precise, rigorous, and
inflexible; and that the counsel for the criminal would endeavor to
introduce the same rules, with the same severity and exactness, into
this trial.
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