William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) was one of the outstanding statesmen of Victorian Britain and one of Britain's greatest Liberal prime ministers. This is an extract from his speech to the House of Commons on the 1866 Reform Bill, a piece of legislation that sought to extend the franchise to better-off working class men. The Bill itself failed, but was followed the next year by the Reform Act 1867, an important milestone in the UK's journey towards universal suffrage.
When I heard it stated by a Gentleman of ability that to touch the question of enfranchising any portion of the working class was domestic revolution, I thought it time to remind him that the performance of the duties of citizenship does give some presumption of the capacity for civil rights, and that the burden of proof, that exclusion from such rights is warrantable or wise or (as it may be) necessary, lies upon those who exclude.... On the same grounds, when I heard my right hon. Friend describing these working men... as an invading army, and as something more, as an invading ambush, as a band of enemies, which was to bring ruin and conflagration as the purpose of its mission, into a city all fore-doomed... I thought it was time to fall back upon elementary truths... and to say, these men whom you are denouncing, not by argument and reason, but beyond the bounds of all argument and reason, are your own flesh and blood....
The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Calne... said that we know nothing of those 204,000 persons, whom it is proposed to enfranchise in boroughs.... What, Sir, do we know nothing of those 204,000? Does my right hon. Friend know nothing of them? We were taught to think he knew a good deal about them. We have not yet wholly forgotten his own significant words so loudly cheered: "we know what sort of men live in these houses."... Nor was this all. Who were those Hyperboreans of the speech of my right hon. Friend? And what was the wind that got colder as the traveller went further north? Was not the comparison this — that as on the earth's surface the cold increases as we move in that direction, so in the downward figures of the franchise the voters became progressively more drunken, or more venal, or, to refrain from recalling those words, I would say simply more and more unfit? Now, Sir, we too know something of those men, but what we know is very different from the supposed knowledge of my right hon. Friend....
[L]et us for a moment consider the enormous and silent changes which have been going forward among the labouring population.... Let us try and raise our views above the fears, the suspicions, the jealousies, the reproaches, and the recriminations of this place and this occasion. Let us look onward to the time of our children and of our children's children. Let us know what preparation it behoves us should be made for that coming time. Is there or is there not, I ask, a steady movement of the labouring classes, and is or is not that movement a movement onwards, and upwards? I do not say that it falls beneath the eye, for, like all great processes, it is unobservable in detail, but as solid and undeniable as it is resistless in its essential character. It is like those movements of the crust of the earth which science tells us are even now going on in certain portions of the globe. The sailor courses over them in his vessel, and the traveller by land treads them without being conscious of these changes; but from day to day, from hour to hour, the heaving forces are at work, and after a season we discern from actual experience that things are not as they were....
....I would ask [the Opposition], "Will you not consider, before you embark in this new crusade, whether the results of those other crusades in which you have heretofore engaged have been so satisfactory to you as to encourage you to repeat the operation?" Great battles you have fought, and fought them manfully. The battle of maintaining civil disabilities on account of religious belief, the battle of resisting the first Reform Act, the obstinate and long-continued battle of Protection, all these great battles have been fought by the great party that I see opposite.... But I ask, again, have their results — have their results towards yourselves — been such as that you should be disposed to renew struggles such as these? Certainly those who compose the Liberal party here, at least in that capacity have no reason or title to find fault. The effect of your course has been to give them for five out of every six, or for six out of every seven years since the epoch of the Reform Act the conduct and management of public affairs. The effect has been to lower, to reduce, and contract your just influence in the country, and to abridge your legitimate share in the administration of the Government. It is good for the public interest that you should be strong; but if you are to be strong, you can only be so by showing, in addition to the kindness and the personal generosity which I am sure you feel towards the people, a public, a political trust and confidence in them.... Perhaps the great division of to-night is not the last that must take place in the struggle. At some point of the contest you may possibly succeed. You may drive us from our seats. You may bury the Bill that we have introduced, but we will write upon its gravestone for an epitaph this line, with certain confidence in its fulfilment — Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb — those great social forces are against you; they are marshalled on our side; and the banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps at some moment it may droop over our sinking heads, yet it soon again will float in the eye of heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and to a not distant victory.
