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.