It is possible, even probable, that, if Struensee had held the power longer, he would have passed from the experimentalising stage to really beneficial results. The beginning of his display of power was not so bad. Denmark had long sighed under the brutal dictatorship which the envoys of Russia exercised. Struensee broke this yoke, and did it so cleverly, that the ambitious czarina in Petersburg was obliged to give way, whether she liked it or not. The management of the foreign policy by Struensee least of all deserves blame, because it was based on the sensible principle that Denmark must live in peace and amity with all states, but not be subject to any one of them. The same praise cannot be afforded to Struensee's home administration. The tendency generally was good and reasonable here, but the execution left much, very much, to be desired. We find everywhere hasty attempts, but no thorough carrying through. A despotic theorising, which was followed by no energetic practice, and the most correct designs destroyed and confused by the interference of personal interests, sympathies, and antipathies, characterised the administration. Struensee's great fault was that he did not, and would not, understand that in statesman-like calculations, not abstract ideas but men are the figures employed in reckoning--men with all their weaknesses, follies, prejudices, and passions. Through mistaking this great fact, he contrived to embitter all classes of the nation. He offended the nobles without winning the peasants; he made the officers, soldiers, and sailors his enemies, without making the citizens his friends. And he did this among a people whose education was behindhand, and to whom he was an object of hatred, from the fact of his being a foreigner. After his fall, which every one but himself had foreseen--and we may fairly say that he signed his own death-warrant by the maniacal cabinet decree which placed all the authority in his hands--Struensee behaved like a miserable coward and traitor. It has been said that his judges, or, more correctly, executioners, terrified the ruined man by a menace of the torture, and, at the same time, deluded him by the idea that his sole chance of salvation was in compromising Caroline Matilda most deeply. But, for all this, a man would never do, and only a weakling and coward would do what he did, when he confessed, on February 21, that he had been the queen's lover. From this moment he could only lay claim to a feeling of contempt. It would not even excuse him were it true, as has been alleged, that a pretended confession of Caroline Matilda's guilt was shown him.