Your Committee thought themselves the more bound to contend for every mode of evidence _to the intention,_ because in many of the cases the gross fact was admitted, and the prisoner and his counsel set up pretences of public necessity and public service for his justification. No way lay open for rebutting this justification, but by bringing out all the circumstances attendant on the transaction. ORDER AND TIME OF PRODUCING EVIDENCE. Your Committee found great impediment in the production of evidence, not only on account of the general doctrines supposed to exist concerning its inadmissibility, drawn from its own alleged natural incompetency, or from its inapplicability under the pleading of the impeachment of this House, but also from the mode of proceeding in bringing it forward. Here evidence which we thought necessary to the elucidation of the cause was not suffered, upon the supposed rules of _examination in chief and cross-examination_, and on supposed rules forming a distinction between evidence _originally_ produced on the charge and evidence offered on _the reply_. On all these your Committee observes in general, that, if the rules which respect the substance of the evidence are (as the great lawyers on whose authority we stand assert they are) no more than rules of convenience, much more are those subordinate rules which regard the order, the manner, and the time of the arrangement. These are purely arbitrary, without the least reference to any fixed principle in the nature of things, or to any settled maxim of jurisprudence, and consequently are variable at every instant, as the conveniencies of the cause may require.