On the other hand, Ministers have been willing to give up their portfolios for the Speaker’s Chair. Spring Rice, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Melbourne Administration, had his heart set on that coveted office. He was in the running for the Speakership in 1835, when James Abercromby was elected. In 1838 Abercromby intimated to Lord Melbourne his intention to resign—throwing a curious side-light on the relations at the time between Mr. Speaker and the Treasury Bench—because from the attitude of Lord John Russell, the Leader of the House, he felt he no longer possessed that degree of Ministerial confidence which, in his opinion, was essential to the due conduct of public business and the maintenance of the authority of the Chair. The Prime Minister induced Abercromby to postpone his resignation, and at the same time satisfied the renewed pretensions of his Chancellor of the Exchequer with the promise that he should be the Government candidate for the Chair whenever it became vacant. But when Abercromby retired in the following year it was found that Spring Rice was not acceptable to the Radicals, and Shaw-Lefevre was selected in order to maintain the unity of the Party and preserve the Liberal succession to the Chair. Again, on the resignation of Arthur Wellesley Peel in 1895, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was willing to lay down his portfolio as Secretary of State for War in the then Liberal Government for the object of his ambition—the Speakership; and it is said that he reluctantly yielded to the urgent representations of his colleagues that the Party could ill spare his services. Just ten years later he became Prime Minister. Still, the office has, as a rule, fallen to unofficial Members, or to Members who have held subordinate Ministerial appointments. Denison, in the opening passages of his _Diary_, states that on April 8, 1857, he was seated in his library at Ossington, when the letters were brought in, and among them was the following: 94 PICCADILLY, _April 7, 1857_. MY DEAR DENISON, We wish to be allowed to propose you for the Speakership of the House of Commons. Will you agree? Yours sincerely, PALMERSTON.