To prevent the last of these evils
all courts in this and all countries have constantly made all their
maxims and principles concerning testimony to conform; although such
courts have been bound undoubtedly by stricter rules, both of form and
of prescript cases, than the sovereign jurisdiction exercised by the
Lords on the impeachment of the Commons ever has been or ever ought to
be. Therefore your Committee doth totally reject any rules by which the
practice of any inferior court is affirmed as a directory guide to an
higher, especially where the forms and the powers of the judicature are
different, and the objects of judicial inquiry are not the same.
Your Committee conceives that the trial of a cause is not in the
arguments or disputations of the prosecutors and the counsel, but in
_the evidence_, and that to refuse evidence is to refuse to hear the
cause: nothing, therefore, but the most clear and weighty reasons ought
to preclude its production. Your Committee conceives, that, when
evidence on the face of it relevant, that is, connected with the party
and the charge, was denied to be competent, _the burden lay upon those
who opposed it_ to set forth the authorities, whether of positive
statute, known recognized maxims and principles of law, passages in an
accredited institute, code, digest, or systematic treatise of laws, or
some adjudged cases, wherein, the courts have rejected evidence of that
nature.
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