With regard to the matter which I am now submitting to your
consideration, I must say for your Committee of Managers and for myself,
that the Report was deliberately made, and does not, as I conceive,
contain any very material error, nor any undue or indecent reflection
upon any person or persons whatever. It does not accuse the Judges of
ignorance or corruption. Whatever it says it does not say calumniously.
That kind of language belongs to persons whose eloquence entitles them
to a free use of epithets. The Report states that the Judges had given
their opinions secretly, contrary to the almost uninterrupted tenor of
Parliamentary usage on such occasions. It states that the mode of giving
the opinions was unprecedented, and contrary to the privileges of the
House of Commons. It states that the Committee did not know upon what
rules and principles the Judges had decided upon those cases, as they
neither heard their opinions delivered, nor have found them entered upon
the Journals of the House of Lords. It is very true that we were and are
extremely dissatisfied with those opinions, and the consequent
determinations of the Lords; and we do not think such a mode of
proceeding at all justified by the most numerous and the best
precedents.
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