Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/449

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 441 sensibly modified Holm's elaborate condemnation of the German innovator, though reiterating one charge of conspiracy which Holm (iv. i. Henv. 30, 48) seemed to have refuted. A later generation can judge such alien intrusion more equably than was possible to men who had lived through 1864, and a vastly increased store of material, notably the great work of Holger Hansen, is now available. But above all as a member of the administration Dr. Linvald is better qualified than his predecessors to appreciate administrative reforms. Their work has by no means banished the view that Struensee, hating and despising a structure which he did not understand, determined to leave not one stone of it standing upon another. History, only slightly less unfavourable to him than contemporary opinion, has presented his amazing career as the outcome of the intellectual revolt inspired from France, the drastic Hohenzollernism instilled into him in Prussia, and ambition. Disposing of Denmark for some eighteen months, he is represented as having produced merely chaos. The main significance of Dr. Linvald's work lies in the fact that, on a dispassionate retrospect, an administrative expert who is also a historian admires Struensee as a reformer of the administration. Hitherto the reader has been offered chiefly generalizations by philosophers, clergymen, pamphleteers, doctors, jurists, and a few historians. Now he is told what the several organs of the Danish state had to do, how Struensee transformed their structure and their duties, and whence he derived the plan of every change. He found power wielded by the council and the ' colleges ' or boards institutions which, it was held, differentiated auto- cracy from despotism, and gave to a monarchy, if well ordered, all the advantages of a republic with none of the defects. The council he abolished ; the colleges he simplified, systematized, and transformed ; the mainspring of the whole machine he contrived in the secret cabinet of the king. In all these changes he is now shown to have been making thorough and effective reforms which had been hinted at or begun before his ministry or which were advocated by others than himself. The general effect of the whole demonstration is to corroborate Struensee's defence that he carried out the king's wishes, or even the king's will. His assistants are shown to have been for the most part able men chosen with rare im- partiality, and the institutions that they devised so far superior to the old that some of the most unfriendly aristocrats in the service cried out against their abolition. In belauding the reorganized treasury, however, Dr. Linvald does not mention the way in which Struensee enriched himself and his friends, whose fortunes contrasted sharply with the miserable pittances to which most stipends and pensions were reduced. ' Struensee's work has had abiding significance,' is Dr. Linvald's verdict. ' His fate did not kill the ideas upon which his organization was based. His is therefore. . . one of the greatest names in the history of the administration.' A foreigner may perhaps be pardoned if he fails to find this verdict proved by the evidence of the final chapter upon the after-history from 1772 to 1816. On Struensee's downfall indeed the council idea triumphed and the colleges gained renewed and increasing importance. If at the same time the cabinet showed vigour, this appears