ABSTRACT
Following its inaugural meeting in November 1867, the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations (NUCCA) began publishing pamphlets intended to educate and inform the approximately 969,000 new voters in England and Wales enfranchised by the 1867 Reform Act. The Tory Reform Act. What Must We Do with It? Register! Register!! Register!!! outlined an historic Tory commitment to Reform going back to William Pitt, a tradition most recently stated by Lord Derby at Manchester on 17 October 1867. It portrayed Disraeli as Leonidas, heading a Spartan force of 300, in the battle of Thermopylae over Reform against the mass Persian forces led by Gladstone and Bright. Citing Peel’s cry of 1837, that Conservative voters needed to ‘register, register, register’, it declared that it was in the Registration Courts that the great institutions of the country must be defended.
