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158 SALMON v. CLAGETT.
any manner, needlessly or expensively impede its course. Its
movements, regulated by well settled principles, are calculated, 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 sim-
plicity of our forms of proceeding would be materially broken in
upon, and confused; great additional expense incurred; new de-
lays produced; and a case which had been moved forward as to a
final hearing, upon the matter in avoidance alleged 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 destructive 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 nor 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 modifications
and qualifications as they have been explained, can, with any de-
gree 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 certainly
defective and insufficient to the full extent designated by the ex-
ceptions 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
defendant to a dissolution of the injunction?
Although these answers have withheld the discovery asked for
by the bill; yet they have, in one sense, most positively denied all
its equity; that is, in the sense in which it might be said to have
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