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.