The General Election of July 1895 saw the Conservatives win with an overall majority of 152 and the Liberal Party were back in Opposition. Mundella, still held in high esteem by his constituents, was returned unopposed for Sheffield Brightside, and his colleagues in the House, holding him in equally high regard despite his resignation the year before, recalled him to the Opposition frontbench. From that position, despite age beginning to tell, he continued his vehement fight for the causes he held most dear. In particular he strongly opposed the Education Bills of 1896 and 1897 which he saw as destructive of the education policy to which he had devoted much of his political life, and he deplored the fact that the compulsory clauses of his Education Act were scarcely enforced so that nearly one-fifth of the potential school population was absent. The result, he pointed out, was widespread illiteracy among those of school-leaving age.