The same principle of policy has dictated a principle of relaxation
with regard to severe rules of evidence, in all cases similar, though of
a lower order in the scale of criminality. It is against fundamental
maxims that an accomplice should be admitted as a witness: but
accomplices are admitted from the policy of justice, otherwise
confederacies of crime could not be dissolved. There is no rule more
solid than that a man shall not entitle himself to profit by his own
testimony. But an informer, in case of highway robbery, may obtain forty
pounds to his own profit by his own evidence: this is not in consequence
of positive provision in the act of Parliament; it is a provision of
policy, lest the purpose of the act should be defeated.

Now, if policy has dictated this very large construction of an act of
Parliament concerning high treason, if the same policy has dictated
exceptions to the clearest and broadest rules of evidence in other
highly penal causes, and if all this latitude is taken concerning
matters for the greater part within our insular bounds, your Committee
could not, with safety to the larger and more remedial justice of the
Law of Parliament, admit any rules or pretended rules, unconnected and
uncontrolled by circumstances, to prevail in a trial which regarded
offences of a nature as difficult of detection, and committed far from
the sphere of the ordinary practice of our courts.

If anything of an over-formal strictness is introduced into the trial of
Warren Hastings, Esquire, it does not seem to be copied from the
decisions of these tribunals. It is with great satisfaction your
Committee has found that the reproach of "disgraceful subtleties,"
inferior rules of evidence which prevent the discovery of truth, of
forms and modes of proceeding which stand in the way of that justice the
forwarding of which is the sole rational object of their invention,
cannot fairly be imputed to the Common Law of England, or to the
ordinary practice of the courts below.

CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE, ETC.

The rules of evidence in civil and in criminal cases, in law and in
equity, being only reason methodized, are certainly the same. Your
Committee, however, finds that the far greater part of the law of
evidence to be found in our books turns upon questions relative to civil
concerns. Civil cases regard property: now, although property itself is
not, yet almost everything concerning property and all its modifications
is