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.[40] 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 _viva 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.[41]