The subtlety of Crown lawyers in drawing indictments for treason, and the willingness of judges to favour such prosecutions, have considerably eluded the chief difficulties which the several statutes appear to throw in their way. The government has at least had no reason to complain that the construction of those enactments has been too rigid. The overt acts laid in the indictment are expressed so generally that they give sometimes little insight into the particular circumstances to be adduced in evidence; and, though the act of William is positive that no evidence shall be given of any overt act not laid in the indictment, it has been held allowable, and is become the constant practice, to bring forward such evidence, not as substantive charges, but on the pretence of its tending to prove certain other acts specially alleged. The disposition to extend a constructive interpretation to the statute of Edward III. has continued to increase; and was carried, especially by Chief-Justice Eyre in the trials of 1794, to a length at which we lose sight altogether of the plain meaning of words, and apparently much beyond what Pemberton, or even Jefferies, had reached. In the vast mass of circumstantial testimony which our modern trials for high treason display, it is sometimes difficult to discern whether the great principle of our law, requiring two witnesses to overt acts, has been adhered to; for certainly it is not adhered to, unless such witnesses depose to acts of the prisoner, from which an inference of his guilt is immediately deducible.[251] There can be no doubt that state prosecutions have long been conducted with an urbanity and exterior moderation unknown to the age of the Stuarts, or even to that of William; but this may by possibility be compatible with very partial wrestling of the law, and the substitution of a sort of political reasoning for that strict interpretation of penal statutes which the subject has a right to demand. No confidence in the general integrity of a government, much less in that of its lawyers, least of all any belief in the guilt of an accused person, should beguile us to remit that vigilance which is peculiarly required in such circumstances.[252]