you prohibited all rules whatever, would infallibly be guided by the
practice of English courts. To abolish the rules of evidence would be
simply to leave everything 'to mere personal discretion.' Moreover, the
rules have 'a real though a negative' value as providing solid tests of
truth. The best shoes will not enable a man to walk nor the best glasses
to see; and the best rules of evidence will not enable a man to reason
any better upon the facts before him. It is a partial perception of this
which has caused the common distrust of them. But they do supply
'negative' tests, warranted by long experience, upon two great points.
The first is that when you have to make an inference from facts, the
facts should be closely connected in specified ways with the fact to be
decided. The second is, that whatever fact has to be proved, should be
proved by the best evidence, by the actual document alleged, or by the
man who has seen with his own eyes or heard with his own ears the things
or the words asserted to have occurred.

If, however, these rules are substantially the expressions of sound
common sense, worked out by practical sagacity, it is equally true that
'no body of rules upon an important subject were ever expressed so
loosely, in such an intricate manner, or at such intolerable length.'
The fact is that the intricate and often absurd theory by which they are
connected came after the 'eminently sagacious practice' which the theory
was intended to justify. English lawyers, by long practice in the
courts, acquire an instinctive knowledge of what is or is not evidence,
although they may have hardly given a thought to the theory. The English
text-books, which are meant for practical purposes, are generally
'collections of enormous masses of isolated rulings generally relating
to some very minute point.' They are arranged with reference to 'vague
catchwords,' familiar to lawyers, rather than to the principles really
invoked. One of the favourite formulae, for example, tells us, 'hearsay
is no evidence.' Yet 'hearsay' and 'evidence' are both words which have
been used in different senses ('evidence,' for example, either means a
fact or the statement that the fact exists), and the absence of any
clear definitions has obscured the whole subject.

Now as Indian officials have to manage very difficult investigations,
with no opportunity for acquiring the lawyer's instinct, and without the
safeguard afforded in England by a trai