A second time do the hopes of the people rise; Napoleon prepares himself for war against Russia. Again is the time come when a struggle is possible; already does Hardenberg venture to tell the French ambassador, St. Marsan, that 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.