he English
law-writers have, perhaps as wisely, in a manner abandoned the pursuit.
In truth, it seems a wild attempt to lay down any rule for the proof of
intention by circumstantial evidence. All the acts of the party,--all
things that explain or throw light on these acts,--all the acts of
others relative to the affair, that come to his knowledge, and may
influence him,--his friendships and enmities, his promises, his threats,
the truth of his discourses, the falsehood of his apologies, pretences,
and explanations, his looks, his speech, his silence where he was called
to speak,--everything which tends to establish the connection between
all these particulars,--every circumstance, precedent, concomitant, and
subsequent, become parts of circumstantial evidence. These are in their
nature infinite, and cannot be comprehended within any rule or brought
under any classification.

Now, as the force of that presumptive and conjectural proof rarely, if
ever, depends on one fact only, but is collected from the number and
accumulation of circumstances concurrent in one point, we do not find an
instance, until this trial of Warren Hastings, Esquire, (which has
produced many novelties,) that attempts have been made by any court to
call on the prosecutor for an account of the purpose for which he means
to produce each particle of this circumstantial evidence, to take up the
circumstances one by one, to prejudge the efficacy of each matter
separately in proving the point,--and thus to break to pieces and to
garble those facts, upon the multitude of which, their combination, and
the relation of all their component parts to each other and to the
culprit, the whole force and virtue of this evidence depends. To do
anything which can destroy this collective effect is to deny
circumstantial evidence.

Your Committee, too, cannot but express their surprise at the particular
period of the present trial when the attempts to which we have alluded
first began to be made. The two first great branches of the accusation
of this House against Warren Hastings, Esquire, relate to public and
notorious acts, capable of direct proof,--such as the expulsion of Cheyt
Sing, with its consequences on the province of Benares, and the seizure
of the treasures and jaghires of the Begums of Oude. Yet, in the proof
of those crimes, your Committee cannot justly complain that we were very
narrowly circumscribed in the production of much circumstantial as well
as