Chapter Ten

1859-67

First Step, then 'Leap into the Dark'

Electoral Reform

POPULAR DEMAND for electoral reform provided Disraeli with opportunities for re-establishing the Conservatives as a national party, a majority government. The 'leap in the dark' - a phrase taken by Lord Cranborne (later 3rd Marquess of Salisbury) from the dying words of the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, led to the Conservatives successfully introducing household (male) suffrage, effectively outdoing the Liberals in radicalism.