March 4th, 1884.
Sir,—There are some points in the letter you have addressed to me which I am unwilling to pass over in silence lest I should be taken to admit your assertions.
In the first place, it is necessary that I should point out to you that the action of the House of Commons with respect to yourself has not been arbitrary or capricious, but has been founded on principles deliberately adopted by a large majority of its members of various political opinions, to which principles they have steadily adhered, and which they have always been prepared to justify.
In the second place it should be clearly understood that in all the steps which we have taken with respect to yourself, including some which we took with the greatest reluctance, we were acting on the defensive, in consequence of your repeated attempts to override or to evade the repeated decisions of the House of Commons.
The brief history of your case is this. You were duly elected member for Northampton at the General Election of 1880. On presenting yourself to take your seat you tendered an affirmation instead of an oath, and supported your claim to affirm by reference to the fact that you had been permitted to do so in a court of law under the Evidence Amendment Acts of 1869 and 1870. That claim at once, and necessarily, brought under the notice of the House that you must either yourself have objected in a court of law to take an oath, or must have been objected to as incompetent to do so, and that the presiding judge must have been satisfied that the taking of an oath would have no binding effect upon your conscience.
That being so, a Committee was appointed by the House to consider whether the Evidence Amendment Acts were applicable to the case of a member of the House of Commons desiring to take his seat and to comply with the necessary conditions.
It was held by the Committee that they were not so applicable, and this finding of the Committee was subsequently confirmed by the judgment of the Court of Appeal.
Upon being refused permission to affirm, you immediately came to the table of the House and offered to take the oath. This proceeding was objected to, and the majority of the House (still, as theretofore, composed of members of different shades of politics) refused to allow you to go through the form of taking an oath, which, by the hypothesis on which your original claim to affirm was founded, as well as by the evidence afforded by a letter of your own, they held you to be incompetent really to take, and which they considered it would be a profanation to allow you to pretend to take.
That was the ground taken by the House on the 23rd June, 1880, and it is the ground which it has maintained ever since.
You have, since the adoption of that resolution, made various attempts to force the House to admit you to a seat, while still maintaining its objection; and those attempts have, on more than one occasion, led to scenes of a very indecent and disorderly character. In its anxiety to prevent the recurrence of such scenes, the House has felt itself obliged to adopt measures of rigid exclusion, which it would gladly have avoided.