cessful amendments to the 1867 Reform Act, extending the vote to about 1 million urban workers.3
GladstoneÆs remaking of himself as a champion of the working man (and almost as strong a champion of women, working and otherwise, for he was far more adamant in his support of womenÆs suffrage than most other Liberal politicians of his time) took great personal courage, for he had to recreate himself in public. One cannot imagine that he would have had the courage to do this had he not been fervently convinced of both the rightness and importance of his reformist beliefs. He must also have believed without question that he had an obligation to make Britain (including her colonies) a fundamentally more democratic place, where the poor and women and even the natives of the colonies were equal not only in the eyes of God but at the ballot box as well.4
GladstoneÆs early years as a politician marked him as a solid and consistent conservative as he opposed almost all reform. His first parliamentary speech was a defense of slavery in the West Indies and he was a staunch defender of the Church of England.5 These positions correlated with personal beliefs and familial experiences of his. He was ardent member of the Church and his family worked their colonial estate in British Guiana with slaves. Moreover, he believed very strongly in personal loyalty, and the politicians to whom he had first attached himself were Tory Conservatives, and he felt that he owned them intellectual fealty.6 Much if not all of the liberalism that he would display later on in his public life resulted not so much from a change in the inner man (although there were certainly internal shifts) as from an increasing ability on the part of Gladstone (and others in his party) to distinguish his own preferences and needs from those of others not like himself. Indeed, this tolerance for diversity of life choices is perhaps the defining element of liberal thought to the cur...