The Unionists came back triumphant from the country. There was still a feeling in the Party, though not, indeed, prevailing to any wide extent, that the Speaker of the new Parliament should be chosen from its ranks. It was pointed out that for sixty years there had not been a Conservative Speaker—Manners-Sutton having been the last—and, apart altogether from the legitimate ambition of the Conservatives to have a Speaker of their own way of thinking, it was argued that in building up the body of precedents which guide, if they do not control, the duties of the Chair, Conservative opinion ought to have its proper share, if these precedents are truly to reflect the sense of the House generally. But tradition and practice in the House of Commons were too powerful to be overborne. At the meeting of the new Parliament, in August 1895, Gully was unanimously re-elected to the Chair. The aloofness and supremacy of the Speakership has one fine effect. It gives to the House, despite its Party divisions, an ennobling sense of national unity. 3 The Speaker forfeits—actually, though perhaps not theoretically—his rights as the representative of a constituency in the House. He is disqualified from speaking in the debates and voting in the divisions. The constituency which he represents is, therefore, in a sense disfranchised. But there is no record of a constituency ever having objected to its representative being made Speaker. No doubt it appreciates the distinction. Formerly it was customary for the Speaker to join in the debates and divisions when the House was in Committee, he having left the Chair, and the proceedings being presided over by the Chairman. In Committee on the Bill for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, Mr. Speaker Addington, on February 12, 1799, declared that, while he was in favour of the plan, he was strongly opposed to Catholic emancipation with which Pitt was disposed to accompany it. If it were a question, he said, between the re-enactment of all the Popery laws for the repression of Ireland, or the Union, coupled with Catholic emancipation, for the pacification of Ireland, he would prefer the former. Again, during the Committee stage of the Bill introduced by Henry Grattan, in 1813, to qualify Roman Catholics for election as Members of Parliament, an amendment to omit the vital words, “to sit and vote in either House of Parliament,” was moved by Mr. Speaker Abbot (strongly opposed, like Addington, to the removal of the Catholic disabilities), and having been carried by a majority, though only a small one of four votes, proved fatal to the measure. Manners-Sutton also exercised his right to speak in Committee three times on such highly controversial questions as Catholic emancipation and the claims of Dissenters to be admitted to the Universities, to both of which he, like his predecessors in the Chair, answered an uncompromising “No.”