Still, in spite of Struensee's deficiency and all his mistakes, so much justice must be done him as to allow that he desired the welfare of the state. He originally possessed a not ignoble mind, which was lowered and degraded by his fabulous elevation and sudden fall. Being formed of much softer and more worthless stuff than the metal out of which great, or even second-rate statesmen are composed, he could not endure either fortune or misfortune. An idealist, trained in the school of enlightened despotism, he did not understand that a nation must be raised from the bottom to the top. This was the mistake of the age. The reasons of state of a Frederick the Great or a Joseph II. were, after all, only an improvement of the breed. We have all due respect for those enlightened despots who have so far freed themselves from the swaddling-clothes of the Byzantine ideas about the divine right of kings, as to wish themselves to be merely regarded as the first servants of the state; but, at the same time, we are inclined to say with old Wieland, "May Heaven protect us from the luck of being obliged to live under the sceptre or stick of such first servants of the state." Struensee acted on the principle that, in order to make nations progress, nothing further was required than to realise by edicts the principles of the French philosophers and German illuminati. After the fashion of many other world-betterers of the age, he did not know or reflect that it is far more difficult to lead the unjudging masses to what is good, than to what is bad; that the most absurd prejudices of the plebs must be humoured far more than the noblest human privileges; that the coarse diplomacy of pot-house demagogues is sufficient to make the ignorant mob throw away the diamonds of truth and eagerly clutch at the _strass_ of falsehood and absurdity; and that, lastly, the people in all times are most willing, at the desire of their enemies, to hate, persecute, stone, and crucify their friends.