After two days of largely irrelevant debate, Wolff's motion was rejected by 289 votes to 214--a result not ungratifying to the Tories, as showing that already certain Liberals had taken their side. A select committee of twenty-three was duly appointed, the Tories being defeated in an attempt to strengthen their representation on it. The members were:--The Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, Messrs Bright, Chaplin, Childers, Sir Richard Cross, Mr Gibson, Sir Gabriel Goldney, Mr Grantham, Mr Staveley Hill, Sir John Holker, Mr Beresford Hope, Mr Hopwood, Sir Henry Jackson, Lord Henry Lennox, Mr Massey, Major Nolan, Messrs Pemberton, Simon, Trevelyan, Walpole, Whitbread, and Watkin Williams. The Committee began by examining Sir Thomas Erskine May as to precedents; and Mr Bradlaugh was allowed to put questions to him likewise, bringing forward precedents Sir Thomas had not noted, among them the important case of Sir Francis Bacon, who, as Attorney-General, was challenged for breaking the law in making oath that he was duly qualified to sit, when, as a practising barrister, he was legally disqualified under an Act of Edward III. (It was in this case that the House ruled: "Their oath their own consciences to look unto, not we to examine it.") After Sir Thomas May, Bradlaugh was himself examined, and conducted his case with the lawyer-like exactitude and the more than lawyer-like concision and cogency which even his enemies admitted to belong to all his legal pleadings.[133] He pointed out that if it were competent to the House to interfere between a member and the oath, the first forty members sworn in a Parliament might prevent the sitting of any of the rest; and that if he were held legally incompetent to make affirmation of allegiance, he stood legally bound, as an elected member, to take the oath, no matter what his opinions were. He formally stated-- [Footnote 133: See the report of the Committee's proceedings, reprinted in his "True Story of my Parliamentary Struggle."] "That there is nothing in what I did when asking to affirm which in any way disqualifies me from taking the oath. "That all I did was--believing, as I then did, that I had the right to affirm--to claim to affirm, and that I was then absolutely silent as to the oath. "That I did not refuse to take it; nor have then or since expressed any mental reservation or stated that the appointed oath of allegiance would not be binding upon me. "That, on the contrary, I say and have said that the essential part of the oath is in the fullest and most complete degree binding upon my honour and conscience, and that the repeating the words of asseveration does not in the slightest degree weaken the binding effect of the oath of allegiance upon me." These explicit statements he repeated again and again in answer to questions, saying once:--