that members of the Committee do propose, after your statement is concluded, to ask some questions of you; but I have to inform you, at the same time, that you will be invited, and are invited, to state any objections that you may entertain to any such questions when put, and that you shall have a full opportunity of addressing the Committee after they have heard your answers to the questions so put?—That will enable me to eliminate a portion of my argument. I wish to submit to the Committee one observation on the precedent of Daniel O’Connell, and that is that, as a matter of fact, the evidence of Sir Thomas Erskine May shows that he misapprehended that precedent. It was a refusal by Daniel O’Connell to take the Oaths by law required of a member at the date of his election. Between the date of his election and the date of his refusal the law had changed, but it had not changed (so the House interpreted the Statute, or so the Statute ran, I do not know which) at the date of his election. So that I submit that Daniel O’Connell’s case is a case of a Member refusing to take the Oath by law required; and I further submit that the Parliamentary Debates will show that the words which appear as being used by Mr. O’Connell on the 19th of May, sufficiently expressed his reason for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy some days at least before the House asked him again to take it. Then I have only two other matters which I should wish to submit to the Committee. One is that I have, neither directly nor indirectly, obtruded upon the House, since I have been a Member, any of my utterances or publications upon any subject whatever; that there is no precedent, except in the case of John Wilkes, for any reference on the part of any opposing Member to such publications by any Member prior to the taking of his seat; and that the ultimate decision of the House in John Wilkes’s case is directly against the introduction by any Member hostile to me of any such matter as a reason for my not being allowed to take my seat. Finally, I most respectfully submit that I have grave matter of complaint that my privileges as a Member of the House of Commons have been seriously infringed, and that the rights of the electors, my constituents, have been ignored in the attacks made upon me without previous notice to me; attacks to which I had no opportunity of making a dignified reply; attacks which, if the newspaper reports be accurate, were in many instances based upon absolute misapprehension or misquotation of my publications, and in one instance at any rate, based upon the most extreme misrepresentation of my conduct. I thank the Committee for listening to me, and I regret if my want of knowledge of the forms of the House has involved my saying anything in a manner in which the Committee would prefer that I should not have said it.