These precedents lean all one way, and carry no marks
of accommodation to the variable spirit of the times and of political
occasions. They are the same before and after the Revolution. They are
the same through five reigns. The great men who presided in the
tribunals which furnished these examples were in opposite political
interests, but all distinguished for their ability, integrity, and
learning.

The Earl of Nottingham, who was the first on the bench to promulgate
this publicity as a rule, has not left us to seek the principle in the
case: that very learned man considers the publicity of the questions and
answers as a matter of justice, _and of justice favorable to the
prisoner_. In the case of Mr. Hastings, the prisoner's counsel did not
join your Committee in their endeavors to obtain the publicity we
demanded. Their reasons we can only conjecture. But your Managers,
acting for this House, were not the less bound to see that the due
Parliamentary course should be pursued, even when it is most favorable
to those whom they impeach. If it should answer the purposes of one
prisoner to waive the rights which belong to all prisoners, it was the
duty of your Managers to protect those general rights against that
particular prisoner. It was still more their duty to endeavor that their
_own_ questions should not be erroneously stated, or cases put which
varied from those which they argued, or opinions given in a manner not
supported by the spirit of our laws and institutions or by analogy with
the practice of all our courts.

Your Committee, much in the dark about a matter in which it was so
necessary that they should receive every light, have heard, that, in
debating this matter abroad, it has been objected, that many of the
precedents on which we most relied were furnished in the courts of the
Lord High Steward, and not in trials where the Peers were Judges,--and
that the Lord High Steward not having it in his power to retire with the
juror Peers, the Judges' opinions, from necessity, not from equity to
the parties, were given before that magistrate.

Your Committee thinks it scarcely possible that the Lords could be
influenced by such a feeble argument. For, admitting the fact to have
been as supposed, there is no sort of reason why so uniform a course of
precedents, in a legal court composed of a peer for judge and peers for
triers, a course so favorable to all parties and to equal justice, a
course in concurrence