Perhaps the most important reform he effected was in the administration of justice. It was decreed that henceforth all men, whatever their rank, were equal before the law; judges who had shown themselves corrupt or negligent in the performance of their duties were removed from their posts, and the delay in hearing trials was censured. A multiplicity of law courts existed in Copenhagen and the provinces, which caused great confusion and hindered the course of justice; these were all abolished, and in their stead a single jurisdiction was instituted. This reform gave great offence to lawyers, who lost many fees thereby, but it proved most effectual for the better administration of justice.
The civic government of Copenhagen was reformed with a view to bettering the management of the city revenues and the carrying out of improvements. The streets were named and lighted, and the houses were numbered. These changes gave almost as much offence to the burghers as the abolition of festivals had given to the clergy, for they were regarded as encroachments on the rights and liberties which the city had obtained at various times from the Kings of Denmark. But Struensee did not heed, and routed the forces of bumbledom in the same way as he had routed those of bigotry. He even aimed a blow at Sabbatarianism, and forbade the police of Copenhagen to enter private houses without a warrant, and meddle with what might, or might not, be done by the inhabitants on Sundays. Heretofore if found working or indulging in “unseemly merriment” in their houses on Sundays, citizens were liable to fine or imprisonment—a system which led to gross abuses of the power of the police, but which was tenaciously upheld by the magistrates and clergy.
Other reforms included the abolition of the censorship of the press, leaving it perfectly free; a regulation aimed at the fraudulence of trustees; and another to check the extravagant expense of funerals, which were often so costly as to entail ruin on the family of the deceased. No abuse seemed too small to escape the eagle eye of the reformer.
A royal decree was issued which benefited the serfs. Hitherto they had been helpless slaves in the hands of their tyrannical masters—the nobles and landowners; but now they were only required to render compulsory service on certain days and hours of the week, and the remaining time was their own. The peasants were also placed under the protection of the law, and all the privileges that belonged to ordinary citizens were granted to them. The peasant question was a very difficult one in Denmark, and it was Struensee’s intention one day to abolish serfdom altogether. But in this reform even he was compelled to proceed by degrees.
Another royal decree abolished the salt tax, which had lain very heavily on the poorer classes, and had caused an outbreak among the peasantry. The abolition of this tax was most popular, though the reform was resisted by the nobility. A similar measure was an order forbidding the exportation of corn to foreign countries, while the importation from the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein and from one inland province to another was encouraged. The large landowners had been in the habit of selling their corn for export abroad at high prices, while their peasantry were starving for bread. This was effectually checked by this edict; many thousand loads of grain of every description were prevented from leaving the kingdom; and, during the severe winter which followed, were brought from the provincial granaries to Copenhagen, with the result that flour was sold at half the ordinary price to the inhabitants. It was also decreed that bread should be sold at the same low rate to the poor.
Queen Matilda had probably something to do with the measures for improving the condition of the poor, for she had great sympathy with toiling and suffering humanity. A few weeks after the regulations enforcing the sale of cheap bread, a hospital for six hundred poor children was established in Copenhagen. In this institution the Queen took a keen interest, and to cover the cost of founding and maintaining it a tax was levied on all carriage and saddle horses in the capital—another device by which the rich were taxed for the benefit of the poor, a complete reversal of the former order of things, whereby the poor were ground down for the benefit of the rich.
Against these beneficial reforms no objection could reasonably be taken, and whatever the private character and motives of the man responsible for them, they reflected great honour on his public administration. But when he came forward as a moral reformer, his views were more open to cavil. Copenhagen in the eighteenth century was a very immoral city despite severe penalties on immorality, and a system of police supervision that interfered with the liberty of the subject—if the subject were poor. Struensee would have done well to correct the abuses of the existing system for the suppression of vice, but he chose rather to abolish it altogether. “Improved morals,” wrote this eminent moralist, in one of his virtuous monarch’s royal decrees, “cannot be brought about by police regulations, which are also an encroachment on human liberty; for immoral conduct, if it have no directly injurious influence on the quiet and safety of society, must be left to the conscience to condemn. The secret vices which enforced constraint entail are frequently much greater offences against morality, and constraint only generates hypocrisy.” There was no doubt something to be urged from Struensee’s point of view. He had theories about racial perfectionism, and like many before and since, believed that artificial selection would produce a higher breed of men. With these ideas the conventional views of morality seemed to him superfluous, and his reforms were aimed quite as much against them as against social abuses.
For instance, the Danish penal laws directed against illegitimacy were barbarous; they called for reform, but Struensee swept them away altogether. He decreed that henceforth illegitimate children should not rest under any stigma; they were in future to be christened in precisely the same way as if they were legitimate, and irregular birth should no longer prevent a man from learning a trade, or carrying on a business. Mothers of illegitimate children were no more to be punished—the fathers had always got off scot free. For a long time, in consequence of these same cruel laws, secret births, child murder, and the desertion and exposure of new-born infants to the cold had been common in Copenhagen. To remedy this evil Struensee and the Queen imitated Catherine of Russia, and established a Foundling Hospital in Copenhagen,[157] but apparently without any safeguards to prevent its abuse. It began in a small way. A drawer containing a mattress was placed outside a window of the lying-in hospital; a notice was affixed that unfortunate mothers who were unable to maintain, from any cause, their children, could leave them there, to be taken care of by the state. This crêche was so eagerly availed of that no less than twenty-four children were found in it during the first four days, and the number increased rapidly. The following Sunday, from almost every pulpit in Copenhagen, came denunciation of the new institution for foundlings. The clergy denounced it root and branch, as putting a premium on illegitimacy and immorality, and as throwing an unjust burden on the virtuous and industrious classes, by compelling them to rear and maintain the deserted offspring of the immoral and the idle. But Struensee did not heed. The old order of things, he maintained, had resulted in infanticide, and wicked waste of human life. And he held that these children, who had no fault but their illegitimacy, which was not their fault, might with proper care be reared into useful citizens. That he might thereby be going against his pet theory of racial perfectionism, and encouraging the multiplication of the unfit, apparently did not occur to him.
[157] Catherine the Great established a Foundling Hospital in St. Petersburg in 1763, with the aid of the philanthropist Demidoff. The Empress gave 50,000 roubles towards its maintenance, and granted it privileges and favours such as no benevolent institution had ever received before, including exemption from taxation and the monopoly of the state lottery.