The next steps that Struensee took appear to me to have been of a very serious nature, and to have resulted from his erroneous views about population. It is quite true that secret births, infanticide, and the exposure of infants, were common in Copenhagen. In order to prevent these unnatural crimes, Struensee ordered a drawer containing a mattress to be placed at a window of the Lying-in Hospital looking on the street, in which unfortunate mothers could lay their children to be taken care of by the state. After this had been carried into effect, twenty-four children were placed in the _crèche_ during the first four days. Aiding foundlings is a duty which government cannot neglect without violating the laws of humanity, but detecting and punishing parents who desert their children is no less obligatory. The clergy were therefore in the right when they denounced the new state of things, and stated that it favoured debauchery and indolence, degraded marriage, and enfeebled the advantages and rights that ought to encourage it: that it was rearing, at the cost of the industrious classes, a race of wretches, who would only increase the duties of the police and the expenses of the state. But Struensee was of the same opinion as Frederick the Great, who only saw in the human species a mode of producing soldiers: taking the increase or diminution of the population as a positive index of a state of prosperity or decay, Struensee--instead of merely favouring it indirectly, by causing good order and diminishing the impediments that checked the industry of private persons, and prevented them from attaining a competency--persuaded himself that the increased multiplication of children was the most efficacious method of augmenting the public prosperity; or, in other words, he confounded the effect with the cause. Hence it is a remarkable circumstance that the Foundling Hospital was almost the only one of Struensee's institutions that survived his fall. Foreign affairs had during the last year attracted general attention. The insulting pretensions of the Court of Petersburg had been broken by Bernstorff's dismissal. Up to this time, Filosofow only required to utter the threat, "Well, the treaty for the exchange of territory will not be ratified," in order to obtain what he required. Now, the arrangement by which the foreign envoys had to apply in writing to the king, cut off all opportunity for personally approaching the king, and we have seen how angry Filosofow was at the change. At the same time as he sent off his courier to Petersburg, however, the Danish government despatched Aide-de-Camp von Warnstedt with a letter from the king to the empress, notifying the dismissal of Bernstorff, and containing the assurance that the change would in no way affect the friendly relations between the two courts.