ABSTRACT

Lord Cranborne's ally, the Earl of Carnarvon, spoke of revolution. 'The Conservative party is in imminent danger of going to pieces now if indeed it does not disappear under the deluge that the Government are bringing on'. Even the Act's supporters offered little more than bemused agnosticism. Derby himself purloined a phrase of Lord Palmerston's in appraising Lord John Russell's Bill of 1854 when he talked of 'taking a leap in the dark'. In Britain as a whole the vital issue of seat redistribution acted as a brake on the acceleration of political change which the huge expansion in the number of voters seemed to promise. Rural areas in the south of England obtained proportionately more seats than did the increasingly industrial north-west. The 1867 Reform Act, then, did not turn the political world upside-down overnight. The same parties contested power; working men would not create their own political party for another generation.