In the large urban constituencies the demand for a new and active liberalism had already been gaining ground, and at Westminster itself Gladstone was beginning to identify himself not only with the continued advance of free trade but also with the demand for parliamentary reform. In 1864 he forecast new directions in politics when he stated that the burden of proof concerning the case for reform rested not with the reformers but with their opponents. A year later he lost his seat representing the University of Oxford and was returned as member of Parliament for a populous Lancashire constituency. The timing was right, because, after the death of Palmerston, the question of parliamentary reform was reopened and the Second Reform Bill was passed in 1867.

The reform of 1867 almost doubled the electorate, adding 938,000 new names to the register and extending the franchise to many workingmen in the towns and cities. The county franchise was not substantially changed, but 45 new seats were created by taking one seat from existing borough constituencies with a population of fewer than 10,000. Disraeli hoped that, in return for his support in passing this measure, urban workers would vote for him. He believed rightly that many of them were Conservatives already by instinct and allegiance, but in 1868, in the first general election under the new system, it was Gladstone who was returned as prime minister.

In both parties, new forces were stirring at the local level, and energetic efforts were under way to organize the electorate and the political parties along new lines. Even though Gladstone resumed power, it became apparent that the popular vote was not Liberal by divine right. In several parts of England, particularly in the industrial north, there developed a strong popular Toryism, which in Lancashire, a great centre of the cotton industry, was based partly upon deference to industrial employers, partly upon dislike of Irish immigrants, partly upon popular Protestant associations with Englishness, and not least upon what to many was a surprisingly strong support for the principles of church and state.

With the development of central party machinery and local organization, the role of the crown was reduced during this period to that of merely ratifying the result of elections. Although the queen greatly preferred Disraeli to Gladstone, she could not keep Gladstone out. Her obvious partisanship made some of her acts look unconstitutional, but they would not have been deemed unconstitutional in any previous period of history. The public during this period was more interested in the political leaders than in the queen, who lived in retirement and was sharply criticized in sections of the press.

Gladstone’s first administration had several notable achievements: the disestablishment and partial disendowment of the Irish church, accomplished in 1869 in face of the opposition of the House of Lords; the Irish Land Act of 1870, providing some safeguards to Irish tenant farmers; William Edward Forster’s Education Act of the same year, the first national act dealing with primary education; the Trade-Union Act of 1871, legalizing unions and giving them the protection of the courts; and the Ballot Act of 1872, introducing secret voting. Moreover, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge were opened to Nonconformists, or Dissenters (Protestants who did not conform to the practices of the Church of England), while between 1868 and 1873 the cumbrous military machine was renovated by Gladstone’s secretary for war, Edward Cardwell. The system of dual responsibility of commander in chief and secretary for war also was abolished, and the subordination of the former to the latter was asserted. In 1873 the Judicature Act, amended in 1876, simplified the tangle of legal institutions and procedures. Gladstone, throughout his life, preferred cheap and free government to expensive and socially committed government. He was anxious indeed in 1873 to abolish income tax, on which the public finances of the future were to depend.

Many of these reforms did not satisfy affected interests. The Irish Church Disestablishment Act failed to placate the Irish and alarmed many English churchmen, while the Education Act was passed only in the face of bitter opposition from Nonconformists, who objected that Forster’s system did not break the power of the church over primary education. Although the act was extended in 1880 when primary education was made compulsory and in 1891 when it became free, there were often noisy struggles between churchmen and Nonconformists on the new school boards set up locally under Forster’s act. If the Education Act alienated many Nonconformists, the Licensing Bills of 1871 and 1872 alienated their enemies, the brewers. In the general election of 1874, therefore, months after Disraeli had described the Liberal leaders in one of his many memorable phrases as a “range of exhausted volcanoes,” the brewers threw all their influence behind the Conservatives. “We have been borne down in a torrent of gin and beer,” Gladstone complained.

In his subsequent ministry, with the assistance of men like Richard Cross, the home secretary, Disraeli justified at last his reputation as a social reformer. By the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875, “masters” and “men” were put on an equal footing regarding breaches of contract, while by the Trade-Union Act of 1875, which went much further than the Liberal Act of 1871, trade unionists were allowed to engage in peaceful picketing and to do whatever would not be criminal if done by an individual. The Public Health Act of 1875 created a public health authority in every area; the Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of the same year enabled local authorities to embark upon schemes of slum clearance; a factory act of 1878 fixed a 56-hour workweek; while further legislation dealt with friendly societies (private societies for mutual-health and old-age insurance), the protection of seamen, land improvements carried out by tenants, and the adulteration of food. There was no similar burst of social legislation until after 1906.

If there were significant, though not fully acknowledged, differences between the records of the two governments on domestic issues, there were open, even strident differences on questions of foreign policy. Gladstone had never been a Palmerstonian. He was always anxious to avoid the resort to force, and he put his trust not in national prejudices but in an enlightened public opinion in Europe as well as in Britain. His object was justice rather than power. In practice, however, he often gave the impression of a man who vacillated and could not act firmly. Disraeli, on the other hand, was willing to take risks to enhance British prestige and to seek to profit from, rather than to moralize about, foreign dissensions. His first ventures in “imperialism”—a speech at the Crystal Palace in 1872, the purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875, and the proclamation of the queen as “Empress of India”—showed that he had abandoned the view, popular during the middle years of the century, that colonies were millstones around the mother country’s neck. But these moves did not involve him in any European entanglements, nor did the costly, if brilliantly led, campaigns of Maj. Gen. Frederick Roberts in Afghanistan (1878–80) and the annexation of the Transvaal in South Africa in 1877.

It was the Middle Eastern crisis of 1875–78 that produced the liveliest 19th-century debate on foreign policy issues. In May 1876 Disraeli rejected overtures made by Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany to deal jointly with the Ottoman Empire, which was faced with revolt in Serbia. His pro-Turkish sympathies irritated many Liberals, and, after Turkey had gone on to suppress with great violence a revolt in Bulgaria in 1876, the Liberal conscience was stirred, and mass meetings were held in many parts of the country. Gladstone, who had gone into retirement as Liberal leader in 1875, was slower to respond to the issue than many of his followers, but, once roused, he emerged from retirement, wrote an immensely influential pamphlet on the atrocities, and led a public campaign on the platform and in the press. For him the Turks were “inhuman and despotic,” and, whatever the national interests involved, Britain, in his view, should do nothing to support them. Disraeli’s calculations concerned strategic and imperial necessities rather than ideals of conduct, and his suspicions were justified when the Russians attacked Turkey in April 1877. Opinion swung back to his side, and in 1878 Disraeli sent a British fleet to the Dardanelles. London was seized by war fever—the term jingoism was coined to describe it—which intensified when news arrived that a peace agreement, the Treaty of San Stefano, had been signed whereby Turkey accepted maximum Russian demands. Reservists were mobilized in Britain, and Indian troops were sent to the Mediterranean. Disraeli’s foreign minister, who disapproved of such action, resigned, to be succeeded by Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, marquess of Salisbury, who was eventually to serve as prime minister in the last Conservative administrations of the 19th century. The immediate crisis passed, and, at the Congress of Berlin, an international conference held in June and July 1878, which Disraeli attended, the inroads into Turkish territory were reduced, Russia was kept well away from Constantinople, and Britain acquired Cyprus. Disraeli brought back “peace with honour.” But the swings of public opinion continued, and in 1879 Gladstone, starting at Midlothian in Scotland, fought a nationwide political campaign of unprecedented excitement and drama. In the general election of April 1880, the Liberals returned to power triumphantly, with a majority of 137 over the Conservatives. Disraeli, who had moved to the House of Lords in 1876, died in 1881.