Since Mr Walpole has chosen to print and reprint this maliciously untrue statement, and takes no notice whatever of published protests against it, I am obliged to say in so many words that he, a professed historian, is here grossly perverting history. Much might indeed be set down to his carelessness. Issuing in 1892 the second edition of what should be an authoritative treatise, Mr Walpole inserts (p. 77) a passage as to Parliamentary affirmation which is completely quashed by the passing of Mr Bradlaugh's Affirmation Act of 1888. Of this Act, in 1892, Mr Walpole does not seem to have any knowledge; but however he may contrive to overlook such a fact as this, he cannot have been unaware in 1880 that Mr Bradlaugh did _not_ refuse to take the oath, and that he repudiated the expression that the oath would not be binding on his conscience,[128] repeatedly declaring that any promise he made would as such be binding on his conscience, whether or not an idle formula should be appended to it. Bradlaugh's position on this point was always explicit; for him a promise, however embellished, was a promise which as an honourable man he was bound to keep. By the majority of the British House of Commons it is still implicitly ruled that a certain promise would not necessarily be binding on the consciences of Christian members unless accompanied by the popular imprecation "So help me God." [Footnote 128: A technical assent to this ambiguous question was, as we have seen, the condition attached to affirmation in the law courts. But common decency usually gave the formula there a purely technical and non-natural force.] The decision of the first Select Committee, on the casting vote of the chairman, at once carried the question to a new phase. Bradlaugh immediately published a statement[129] of his position as to the oath, the taking of which he now held to be forced upon him by the refusal of the right to affirm. [Footnote 129: Printed in _National Reformer_ of 30th May 1889, p. 338, and in several London newspapers.] It ran:--