Your Committee, too, cannot but express their surprise at the particular period of the present trial when the attempts to which we have alluded first began to be made. The two first great branches of the accusation of this House against Warren Hastings, Esquire, relate to public and notorious acts, capable of direct proof,--such as the expulsion of Cheyt Sing, with its consequences on the province of Benares, and the seizure of the treasures and jaghires of the Begums of Oude. Yet, in the proof of those crimes, your Committee cannot justly complain that we were very narrowly circumscribed in the production of much circumstantial as well as positive evidence. We did not find any serious resistance on this head, till we came to make good our charges of secret crimes,--crimes of a class and description in the proof of which all judges of all countries have found it necessary to relax almost all their rules of competency: such crimes as peculation, pecuniary frauds, extortion, and bribery. Eight out of nine of the questions put to the Judges by the Lords, in the first stage of the prosecution, related to circumstances offered in proof of these secret crimes. Much industry and art have been used, among the illiterate and unexperienced, to throw imputations on this prosecution, and its conduct, because so great a proportion of the evidence offered on this trial (especially on the latter charges) has been circumstantial. Against the prejudices of the ignorant your Committee opposes the judgment of the learned. It is known to them, that, when this proof is in its greatest perfection, that is, when it is most abundant in circumstances, it is much superior to positive proof; and for this we have the authority of the learned judge who presided at the trial of Captain Donellan. "On the part of the prosecution, a great deal of evidence has been laid before you. It is _all_ circumstantial evidence, and in its nature it must be so: for, in cases of this sort, no man is weak enough to commit the act in the presence of other persons, or to suffer them to see what he does at the time; and therefore it can only be made out by circumstances, either before the committing of the act, at the time when it was committed, or subsequent to it. And a presumption, which necessarily arises from circumstances, is very often more convincing and more satisfactory than any other kind of evidence: because it is not within the reach and compass of human abilities to invent a train of circumstances which shall be so connected together as to amount to a proof of guilt, without affording opportunities of contradicting a great part, if not all, of these circumstances. But if the circumstances are such as, when laid together, bring conviction to your minds, it is then fully equal, if not, as I told you before, _more_ convincing than positive evidence." In the trial of Donellan no such selection was used as we have lately experienced; no limitation to the