SALMON v. CLAGETT.—3 BLAND. 175

excrescences should be allowed to fasten upon and mar their sim-
plicity; or retard their operations, and impose any unnecessary
burthen upon a citizen who desires to obtain the benefit of them,
it does seem to me, that this new course of proceeding can have
no claim to the favorable consideration of this Court. Besides,
the Court of Chancery of Maryland is a judicial structure as little
complicated as an institution of the kind can well be made. It is
lumbered up with no useless officers; and its forms of proceeding
have been almost entirely divested of everything which would in
* any manner, needlessly or expensively impede its course.
Its movements, regulated by well settled principles, are cal- 158
culated, by the easiest modes, to bring the substance and merits
of the matter in dispute distinctly before it; and to carry a case,
with the least possible circuity, directly forward towards a final
determination. But, if this new-fangled mode of pleading were
allowed, the simplicity of our forms of proceeding would be mate-
rially broken in upon, and confused; great additional expense in-
curred; new delays produced; and a case which had been moved
forward as to a final hearing, upon the matter in avoidance al-
leged in the answer; if it was not sustained, would be turned back
to be investigated anew upon interrogatories propounded to the
defendant, and then again brought to a final hearing upon them.
The consequences would be most seriously injurious, if not destruc-
tive of the utility and value of this Court.

Upon the whole, it appears to me, from the fairest and most
mature consideration I have been able to bestow upon those adju-
dications; which have in any manner sanctioned these negative or
affirmative exceptions to the ancient general rule, that a defendant,
who submits to answer, must answer as fully as the bill requires,
have authorized a departure from it, which cannot or ought not
to be approved and followed. And consequently, that this general
rule must be allowed to stand for the government of proceedings
in this Court, without any exception whatever; for I do not con-
sider, that the assumed foundations of the rule, or its modifica-
tions and qualifications as they have been explained, can, with any
degree of propriety, be regarded as exceptions to its application
and operation in any case.

On bringing the several answers of the defendants to the test of
this general rule, it will most clearly appear, that they are cer-
tainly defective and insufficient to the full extent designated by
the exceptions taken to them. Those exceptions must therefore be
sustained.

The investigation called for by the plaintiff's exceptions, and the
disposition which has been made of them, will be of service in the
consideration of the next question that now stands for judgment;
and that is, whether these answers are such as will entitle the de-
fendant to a dissolution of the injunction?