Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  Your Committee apprehends that very serious inconveniencies and mischiefs may hereafter arise from a practice in the House of Lords of considering itself as unable to act without the judges of the inferior courts, of implicitly following their dictates, of adhering with a literal precision to the very words of their responses, and putting them to decide on the competence of the Managers for the Commons, the competence of the evidence to be produced, who are to be permitted to appear, what questions are to be asked of witnesses, and indeed, parcel by parcel, on the whole of the gross case before them, — as well as to determine upon the order, method, and process of every part of their proceedings. The judges of the inferior courts are by law rendered independent of the Crown. But this, instead of a benefit to the subject, would be a grievance, if no way was left of producing a responsibility. If the Lords cannot or will not act without the Judges, and if (which God forbid!) the Commons should find it at any time hereafter necessary to impeach them before the Lords, this House would find the Lords disabled in their functions, fearful of giving any judgment on matter of law or admitting any proof of fact without them [the Judges]; and having once assumed the rule of proceeding and practice below as their rule, they must at every instant resort, for their means of judging, to the authority of those whom they are appointed to judge.

  Your Committee must always act with regard to men as they are. There are no privileges or exemptions from the infirmities of our common nature. We are sensible that all men, and without any evil intentions, will naturally wish to extend their own jurisdiction, and to weaken all the power by which they may be limited and controlled. It is the business of the House of Commons to counteract this tendency. This House had given to its Managers no power to abandon its privileges and the rights of its constituents. They were themselves as little disposed as authorized to make this surrender. They are members of this House, not only charged with the management of this impeachment, but partaking of a general trust inseparable from the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, one of whose principal functions and duties it is to be observant of the courts of justice, and to take due care that none of them, from the lowest to the highest, shall pursue new courses, unknown to the laws and constitution, of this kingdom, or to equity, sound legal policy, or substantial justice. Your Committee were not sent into Westminster Hall for the purpose of contributing in their persons, and under the authority of the House, to change the course or law of Parliament, which had continued unquestioned for at least four hundred years. Neither was it any part of their mission to suffer precedents to be established, with relation to the law and rule of evidence, which tended in their opinion to shut up forever all the avenues to justice. They were not to consider a rule of evidence as a means of concealment. They were not, without a struggle, to suffer any subtleties to prevail which would render a process in Parliament, not the terror, but the protection, of all the fraud and violence arising from the abuse of British power in the East. Accordingly, your Managers contended with all their might, as their predecessors in the same place had contended with more ability and learning, but not with more zeal and more firmness, against those dangerous innovations, as they were successively introduced: they held themselves bound constantly to protest, and in one or two instances they did protest, in discourses of considerable length, against those private, and, for what they could find, unargued judicial opinions, which must, as they fear, introduce by degrees the miserable servitude which exists where the law is uncertain or unknown.

  DEBATES ON EVIDENCE.

  The chief debates at the bar, and the decisions of the Judges, (which we find in all cases implicitly adopted, in all their extent and without qualification, by the Lords,) turned upon evidence. Your Committee, before the trial began, were apprised, by discourses which prudence did not permit them to neglect, that endeavors would be used to embarrass them in their proceedings by exceptions against evidence; that the judgments and opinions of the courts below would be resorted to on this subject; that there the rules of evidence were precise, rigorous, and inflexible; and that the counsel for the criminal would endeavor to introduce the same rules, with the same severity and exactness, into this trial. Your Committee were fully assured, and were resolved strenuously to contend, that no doctrine or rule of law, much less the practice of any court, ought to have weight or authority in Parliament, further than as such doctrine, rule, or practice is agreeable to the proceedings in Parliament, or hath received the sanction of approved precedent there, or is founded on the immutable principles of substantial justice, without which, your Committee readily agrees, no practice in any court, high or low, is proper or fit to be maintained.

  In this preference of the rules observed in the High Court of Parliament, preëminently superior to all the rest, there is no claim made which the inferior courts do not make, each with regard to itself. It is well known that the rules of proceedings in these courts vary, and some of them very essentially; yet the usage of each court is the law of the court, and it would be vain to object to any rule in any court, that it is not the rule of another court. For instance: as a general rule, the Court of King’s Bench, on trials by jury, cannot receive depositions, but must judge by testimony vivâ voce. The rule of the Court of Chancery is not only not the same, but it is the reverse, and Lord Hardwicke ruled accordingly. “The constant and established proceedings of this Court,” said this great magistrate, “are on written evidence, like the proceedings on the Civil and Canon Law. This is the course of the Court, and the course of the Court is the law of the Court.”

  Your Managers were convinced that one of the principal reasons for which this cause was brought into Parliament was the danger that in inferior courts their rule would be formed naturally upon their ordinary experience, and the exigencies of the cases which in ordinary course came before them. This experience, and the exigencies of these cases, extend little further than the concerns of a people comparatively in a narrow vicinage, a people of the same or nearly the same language, religion, manners, laws, and habits: with them an intercourse of every kind was easy.

  These rules of law in most cases, and the practice of the courts in all, could not be easily applicable to a people separated from Great Britain by a very great part of the globe, — separated by manners, by principles of religion, and of inveterate habits as strong as nature itself, still more than by the circumstance of local distance. Such confined and inapplicable rules would be convenient, indeed, to oppression, to extortion, bribery, and corruption, but ruinous to the people, whose protection is the true object of all tribunals and of all their rules. Even English judges in India, who have been sufficiently tenacious of what they considered as the rules of English courts, were obliged in many points, and particularly with regard to evidence, to relax very considerably, as the civil and politic government has been obliged to do in several other cases, on account of insuperable difficulties arising from a great diversity of manners, and from what may be considered as a diversity even in the very constitution of their minds, — instances of which your Committee will subjoin in a future Appendix.

  Another great cause why your Committee conceived this House had chosen to proceed in the High Court of Parliament was because the inferior courts were habituated, with very few exceptions, to try men for the abuse only of their individual and natural powers, which can extend but a little way. Before them, offences, whether of fraud or violence or both, are, for much the greater part, charged upon persons of mean and obscure condition. Those unhappy persons are so far from being supported by men of rank and influence, that the whole weight and force of the community is directed against them. In this case, they are in general objects of protection as well as of punishment; and the course perhaps ought, as it is commonly said to be, not to suffer anything to be applied to their conviction beyond what the strictest rules will permit. But in the cause which your Managers have in charge the circumstances are the very reverse to what happens in the cases of mere personal delinquency which com
e before the [inferior] courts. These courts have not before them persons who act, and who justify their acts, by the nature of a despotical and arbitrary power. The abuses stated in our impeachment are not those of mere individual, natural faculties, but the abuses of civil and political authority. The offence is that of one who has carried with him, in the perpetration of his crimes, whether of violence or of fraud, the whole force of the state, — who, in the perpetration and concealment of offences, has had the advantage of all the means and powers given to government for the detection and punishment of guilt and for the protection of the people. The people themselves, on whose behalf the Commons of Great Britain take up this remedial and protecting prosecution, are naturally timid. Their spirits are broken by the arbitrary power usurped over them, and claimed by the delinquent as his law. They are ready to flatter the power which they dread. They are apt to look for favor [from their governors] by covering those vices in the predecessor which they fear the successor may be disposed to imitate. They have reason to consider complaints as means, not of redress, but of aggravation to their sufferings; and when they shall ultimately hear that the nature of the British laws and the rules of its tribunals are such as by no care or study either they, or even the Commons of Great Britain, who take up their cause, can comprehend, but which in effect and operation leave them unprotected, and render those who oppress them secure in their spoils, they must think still worse of British justice than of the arbitrary power of the Company’s servants which hath been exercised to their destruction. They will be forever, what for the greater part they have hitherto been, inclined to compromise with the corruption of the magistrates, as a screen against that violence from which the laws afford them no redress.

  For these reasons your Committee did and do strongly contend that the Court of Parliament ought to be open with great facility to the production of all evidence, except that which the precedents of Parliament teach them authoritatively to reject, or which hath no sort of natural aptitude directly or circumstantially to prove the case. They have been and are invariably of opinion that the Lords ought to enlarge, and not to contrast, the rules of evidence, according to the nature and difficulties of the case, for redress to the injured, for the punishment of oppression, for the detection of fraud, — and above all, to prevent, what is the greatest dishonor to all laws and to all tribunals, the failure of justice. To prevent the last of these evils all courts in this and all countries have constantly made all their maxims and principles concerning testimony to conform; although such courts have been bound undoubtedly by stricter rules, both of form and of prescript cases, than the sovereign jurisdiction exercised by the Lords on the impeachment of the Commons ever has been or ever ought to be. Therefore your Committee doth totally reject any rules by which the practice of any inferior court is affirmed as a directory guide to an higher, especially where the forms and the powers of the judicature are different, and the objects of judicial inquiry are not the same.

  Your Committee conceives that the trial of a cause is not in the arguments or disputations of the prosecutors and the counsel, but in the evidence, and that to refuse evidence is to refuse to hear the cause: nothing, therefore, but the most clear and weighty reasons ought to preclude its production. Your Committee conceives, that, when evidence on the face of it relevant, that is, connected with the party and the charge, was denied to be competent, the burden lay upon those who opposed it to set forth the authorities, whether of positive statute, known recognized maxims and principles of law, passages in an accredited institute, code, digest, or systematic treatise of laws, or some adjudged cases, wherein, the courts have rejected evidence of that nature. No such thing ever (except in one instance, to which we shall hereafter speak) was produced at the bar, nor (that we know of) produced by the Lords in their debates, or by the Judges in the opinions by them delivered. Therefore, for anything which as yet appears to your Committee to the contrary, these responses and decisions were, in many of the points, not the determinations of any law whatsoever, but mere arbitrary decrees, to which we could not without solemn protestation, submit.

  Your Committee, at an early period, and frequently since the commencement of this trial, have neglected no means of research which might afford them information concerning these supposed strict and inflexible rules of proceeding and of evidence, which, appeared to them, destructive of all the means and ends of justice: and, first, they examined carefully the Rolls and Journals of the House of Lords, as also the printed trials of cases before that court.

  Your Committee finds but one instance, in the whole course of Parliamentary impeachments, in which evidence offered by the Commons has been rejected on the plea of inadmissibility or incompetence. This was in the case of Lord Strafford’s trial; when the copy of a warrant (the same not having any attestation to authenticate it as a true copy) was, on deliberation, not admitted, — and your Committee thinks, as the case stood, with reason. But even in this one instance the Lords seemed to show a marked anxiety not to narrow too much the admissibility of evidence; for they confined their determination “to this individual case,” as the Lord Steward reported their resolution; and he adds,— “They conceive this could be no impediment or failure in the proceeding, because the truth and verity of it would depend on the first general power given to execute it, which they who manage the evidence for the Commons say they could prove.” Neither have objections to evidence offered by the prisoner been very frequently made, nor often allowed when made. In the same case of Lord Strafford, two books produced by his Lordship, without proof by whom they were written, were rejected, (and on a clear principle,) “as being private books, and no records.” On both these occasions, the questions were determined by the Lords alone, without any resort to the opinions of the Judges. In the impeachments of Lord Stafford, Dr. Sacheverell, and Lord Wintoun, no objection to evidence appears in the Lords’ Journals to have been pressed, and not above one taken, which was on the part of the Managers.

  Several objections were, indeed, taken to evidence in Lord Macclesfield’s trial. They were made on the part of the Managers, except in two instances, where the objections were made by the witnesses themselves. They were all determined (those started by the Managers in their favor) by the Lords themselves, without any reference to the Judges. In the discussion of one of them, a question was stated for the Judges concerning the law in a similar case upon an information in the court below; but it was set aside by the previous question.

  On the impeachment of Lord Lovat, no more than one objection to evidence was taken by the Managers, against which Lord Lovat’s counsel were not permitted to argue. Three objections on the part of the prisoner were made to the evidence offered by the Managers, but all without success. The instances of similar objections in Parliamentary trials of peers on indictments are too few and too unimportant to require being particularized; — one, that in the case of Lord Warwick, has been already stated.

  The principles of these precedents do not in the least affect any case of evidence which your Managers had to support. The paucity and inapplicability of instances of this kind convince your Committee that the Lords have ever used some latitude and liberality in all the means of bringing information before them: nor is it easy to conceive, that, as the Lords are, and of right ought to be, judges of law and fact, many cases should occur (except those where a personal vivâ voce witness is denied to be competent) in which a judge, possessing an entire judicial capacity, can determine by anticipation what is good evidence, and what not, before he has heard it. When he has heard it, of course he will judge what weight it is to have upon his mind, or whether it ought not entirely to be struck out of the proceedings.

  Your Committee, always protesting, as before, against the admission of any law, foreign or domestic, as of authority in Parliament, further than as written reason and the opinion of wise and informed men, has examined into the writers on the Civil Law, ancient and more recent, in order to discover what those rules of evidence, in any sort
applicable to criminal cases, were, which were supposed to stand in the way of the trial of offences committed in India.

  They find that the term Evidence, Evidentia, from whence ours is taken, has a sense different in the Roman law from what it is understood to bear in the English jurisprudence; the term most nearly answering to it in the Roman being Probatio, Proof, which, like the term Evidence, is a generic term, including everything by which a doubtful matter may be rendered more certain to the judge: or, as Gilbert expresses it, every matter is evidence which amounts to the proof of the point in question.

  On the general head of Evidence, or Proof, your Committee finds that much has been written by persons learned in the Roman law, particularly in modern times, — and that many attempts have been made to reduce to rules the principles of evidence or proof, a matter which by its very nature seems incapable of that simplicity, precision, and generality which are necessary to supply the matter or to give the form to a rule of law. Much learning has been employed on the doctrine of indications and presumptions in their books, — far more than is to be found in our law. Very subtle disquisitions were made on all matters of jurisprudence in the times of the classical Civil Law, by the followers of the Stoic school. In the modern school of the same law, the same course was taken by Bartolus, Baldus, and the Civilians who followed them, before the complete revival of literature. All the discussions to be found in those voluminous writings furnish undoubtedly an useful exercise to the mind, by methodizing the various forms in which one set of facts or collection of facts, or the qualities or demeanor of persons, reciprocally influence each other; and by this course of juridical discipline they add to the readiness and sagacity of those who are called to plead or to judge. But as human affairs and human actions are not of a metaphysical nature, but the subject is concrete, complex, and moral, they cannot be subjected (without exceptions which reduce it almost to nothing) to any certain rule. Their rules with regard to competence were many and strict, and our lawyers have mentioned it to their reproach. “The Civilians,” it has been observed, “differ in nothing more than admitting evidence; for they reject histriones, &c., and whole tribes of people.” But this extreme rigor as to competency, rejected by our law, is not found to extend to the genus of evidence, but only to a particular species, — personal witnesses. Indeed, after all their efforts to fix these things by positive and inflexible maxims, the best Roman lawyers, in their best ages, were obliged to confess that every case of evidence rather formed its own rule than that any rule could be adapted to every case. The best opinions, however, seem to have reduced the admissibility of witnesses to a few heads. “For if,” said Callistratus, in a passage preserved to us in the Digest, “the testimony is free from suspicion, either on account of the quality of the person, namely, that he is in a reputable situation, or for cause, that is to say, that the testimony given is not for reward nor favor nor for enmity, such a witness is admissible.” This first description goes to competence, between which and credit Lord Hardwicke justly says the discrimination is very nice. The other part of the text shows their anxiety to reduce credibility itself to a fixed rule. It proceeds, therefore,— “His Sacred Majesty, Hadrian, issued a rescript to Vivius Varus, Lieutenant of Cilicia, to this effect, that he who sits in judgment is the most capable of determining what credit is to be given to witnesses.” The words of the letter of rescript are as follow:— “You ought best to know what credit is to be given to witnesses, — who, and of what dignity, and of what estimation they are, — whether they seem to deliver their evidence with simplicity and candor, whether they seem to bring a formed and premeditated discourse, or whether on the spot they give probable matter in answer to the questions that are put to them.” And there remains a rescript of the same prince to Valerius Verus, on the bringing out the credit of witnesses. This appears to go more to the general principles of evidence. It is in these words:— “What evidence, and in what measure or degree, shall amount to proof in each case can be defined in no manner whatsoever that is sufficiently certain. For, though not always, yet frequently, the truth of the affair may appear without any matter of public record. In some cases the number of the witnesses, in others their dignity and authority, is to be weighed; in others, concurring public fame tends to confirm the credit of the evidence in question. This alone I am able, and in a few words, to give you as my determination: that you ought not too readily to bind yourself to try the cause upon any one description of evidence; but you are to estimate by your own discretion what you ought to credit, or what appears to you not to be established by proof sufficient.”