"On no
occasion since, and seldom before, has such a flow of eloquence been
heard within the walls of the House of Commons." Mr. Disraeli spoke for
three hours against the bill, and in his speech accused Mr. Gladstone of
introducing American ideas of Government, and of having once assailed
the very principles he now advocated, when in the Oxford Union he spoke
against the Reform Bill of 1832. Mr. Gladstone's reply was one of the
most noteworthy parts of this famous debate. He rose at one o'clock in
the morning to conclude a legislative battle which had begun two weeks
before. "At last," Mr. Gladstone said, "we have obtained a declaration
from an authoritative source that a bill which, in a country with five
millions of adult males, proposes to add to a limited constituency
200,000 of the middle class and 200,000 of the working class, is, in the
judgment of the leader of the Tory party, a bill to reconstruct the
constitution upon American principles.
"The right honorable gentleman, secure in the recollection of his own
consistency, has taunted me with the errors of my boyhood. When he
addressed the honorable member of Westminster, he showed his magnanimity
by declaring that he would not take the philosopher to task for what he
wrote twenty-five years ago; but when he caught one who, thirty-six
years ago, just emerged from boyhood, and still an undergraduate at
Oxford, had expressed an opinion adverse to the Reform Bill of 1832, of
which he had so long and bitterly repented, then the right honorable
gentleman could not resist the temptation.
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