Disraeli over and over again affirmed that since the nation had endorsed this vital change, its reversal was impracticable unless the considered national demand for it became overwhelming. It was one of his cardinal ideas that without such deliberate demand no great change of national policy should be risked in any department. In 1852, he and Lord Derby appealed to the country on a modified issue of this question--that of a fixed duty. The country’s answer Disraeli considered as final, even in that regard; nor, so far as he was able, would he ever permit these momentous issues to be reopened by any party or section. He remained devoted to the reciprocity principle. He believed that “give and take” is the foundation of trade which is barter. But, though he descried rocks ahead in the future, he recognised that the consumer had benefited by the free opening of our ports, that so far as material wealth was concerned, England had become the emporium and the banker of the world. On the other hand, this very prosperity had aggravated the misery of a class and had raised those problems which are still engaging anxious attention. Utilitarianism, the “cheapest market” theory, had triumphed in the establishment of unrestricted competition, but the upshot of that competition was an increasing strain and disorganisation of native labour. With these evils he left the quickened spirit of “Young England” to cope; while he himself strove to meet them by the remission of the now unjust burdens laid on the land, his industrial franchise bill, and his cherished policy of _sanitas sanitatum_. He had, at any rate, largely influenced the opinion of his generation in bringing home to men’s minds and consciences the equality of the rights of Labour with those of property, and the adequacy of constitutional forms to enforce them; nor did he ever cease to press them in his writings and speeches. But as a statesman he had always to choose between evils; and of these a forced disturbance of a nationally adopted system, which by hasty expedients might tend to disorder and to dispersal, he ever considered the graver. To experiment he always opposed experience. Speaking only two years before his death, he said--