Prussia will not allow itself to be
crushed, and will encounter a foreign attack with 100,000 soldiers. But
the King will not resolve upon a desperate resistance; he gives the
half of his standing army as aid to the French Emperor. Then 300
officers leave his service, and hasten to Russia, there to fight
against Napoleon. And again hope diminishes in Prussia, freedom seems
removed to an immeasurable distance.

Violent has the hatred against the foreign Emperor become in northern
Germany; above all, west of the Elbe, where his ceaseless wars have
sacrificed the youth of the country. The conscription is there
considered as the death lot. The price of a substitute has risen to two
thousand thalers. In all the streets, mourning attire is to be seen,
worn by parents for their lost sons. But most violent of all is the
hatred in Prussia, in every vocation of life, in every house it calls
to the struggle. Everything that is pure and good in Germany--language,
poetry, philosophy, and morals--work silently against Napoleon.
Everything that is bad, corrupt, and wicked, all duplicity and cruelty,
calumny, knavishness and brutal violence, is considered as Gallic and
Corsican. Like the fantastic Jahn, other eager spirits call the Emperor
no longer by his name: they speak of him as once they did of the devil,
as "he," or with a contemptuous expression as Bonaparte.

Thus had six years hardened the character in Prussia.

It was no longer a great State that in the spring of 1813 armed itself
for a struggle of life and death. What remained of Prussia only
comprehended 4,700,000. This small nation in the first campaign brought
into the field an army of 247,000 men, reckoning one out of nineteen of
the whole population. The significance of this is clear, when one
reckons that an equal effort on the part of Prussia as it is, with its
eighteen millions of inhabitants, would give the enormous amount of
950,000 soldiers for an army in the field.[47] And this calculation
conveys only the relative number of men, not the proportion of the then
and present wealth of the country.

It was a much impoverished nation that entered upon the war. Merchants,
manufacturers, and artisans, had for six years struggled fearlessly
against the hard times. The agriculturist had his barns emptied, and
his best horses taken from his stables; the debased coin that
circulated in the country disturbed the interior commerce even with the
nearest neighbours, the th