To combat the latter evils--among others--Disraeli started the “Young England Movement,” and afterwards protested that the old system of trade reciprocity, with tariffs as levers, had proved a better guarantee for _social_ happiness than the retail wealth system of “free imports.” At the same time, as I shall notice, after the repeal of the Corn Laws had cheapened commodities, he was decidedly of opinion that to go back would be too violent an upheaval, unless sanctioned by the deliberate voice of an instructed nation under absolutely new conditions. To forestall the dangers of financial and commercial plutocracy,[76] he planned and supported the many alleviative measures with which his name and Lord Shaftesbury’s are connected, in the teeth, be it remembered, of the Radical and Utilitarian opposition; while he proclaimed in the ’seventies, as he had before proclaimed in the ’fifties, his programme of _Sanitas sanitatum_--Health before Wealth. He foresaw, too, the overcrowding of huge cities through the waste of the soil, with all its attendant miseries; even so early as 1846 he had urged that “nothing is so expensive as a vicious population;” and he felt, also, that if life without toil is “a sorry sort of lot,” toil without life is an infinitely worse one. Above all, he looked in this matter, as throughout, far more to the regeneration of society than to State interference, so easily evaded and so devitalising. And he lamented the colossal enlargement of the towns, which isolates while it excites. “... In cities,” he protests in _Sybil_, “that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest, they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbours as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.” But he descried already a rift in the gloom. “Society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way.”