Meanwhile his Liberalism had been steadily growing, and reached its culmination in 1865, when the great Tory university of Oxford, which he had long represented, rejected him as its member. At once he offered himself as a candidate for South Lancashire, in which his native place was situated, saying, in the opening of his speech at Manchester: "At last, my friends, I am come among you; to use an expression which has become very famous and is not likely to be forgotten, 'I am come among you unmuzzled.'" [=Gladstone the Liberal Leader of the House=] Unmuzzled he was, as his whole future career was to show. Oxford had, in a measure, clipped his wings. Now he was free to give the fullest expression to his liberal faith, and to stand before the country as the great apostle of reform. In 1866 he became, for the first time in his career, leader of the House of Commons--Lord Russel, the Prime Minister, being in the House of Lords. Many of his friends feared for him in this difficult position; but the event proved that they had no occasion for alarm, he showing himself one of the most successful leaders the House had ever had. [=The Suffrage Reform Bill=] His first important duty in this position was to introduce the new suffrage Reform Bill, a measure to extend the franchise in counties and boroughs that would have added about 400,000 voters to the electorate. In the debate that followed Gladstone and Disraeli were again pitted against each other in a grand oratorical contest. Disraeli taunted him with his youthful speech at Oxford against the Reform Bill of 1831. Gladstone replied in a burst of vigorous eloquence, in which he scored his opponent for lingering in a conservatism from which the speaker gloried in having been strong enough to break. He and the Cabinet were pledged to stand or fall with the Bill. But, if it fell, the principle of right and justice which it involved would not fall. It was sure to survive and triumph in the future. He ended with this stirring prediction: "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 into 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 far distant, victory." [=England Agitated on Reform=]