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 retorted by scoring his opponent for clinging to a conservatism which he gloried in having been strong enough to reject. 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 marshaled 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.” He was right in saying that it would not be a distant victory. Disraeli and his party defeated the bill, but the people rose in a vigorous demand for it, ten thousand of them marching past Gladstone’s house, singing odes in honor of “the People’s William.” John Bright, an eloquent orator and strenuous advocate of oral reform and political progress, joined Gladstone in his campaign. Through the force of their eloquence the tide of public opinion rose to such a height that the new Derby-Disraeli ministry was obliged to bring in a bill similar in purpose to that which it had overthrown. DISRAELI’S REFORM MEASURE This Tory bill proved satisfactory to Gladstone in its general features. He had won a great victory in forcing its introduction. But he proposed so many changes in its details—all of them yielded in committee—that a satirical lord remarked that nothing of the original bill remained but its opening word “Whereas.” As thus modified, it was more liberal than the measure that had been defeated, and the people gave full credit for it to Gladstone, whom they credited with giving them their right to vote.