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The Career of Napoleon Bonaparte 471 permitted Prussia to maintain only a small force of not more than forty-two thousand men, but the reformers arranged that this army should be continually recruited by new men, while those who had had some training should retire and form a re- serve. In this way, in spite of Napoleon's restrictions on the size of the regular Prussian army, there were before long as many as a hundred and fifty thousand men sufficiently trained to fight when the opportunity should come. This system was later adopted by other European states and was the basis of the great armies of the Continent at the outbreak of the World War in 1914. 833. Fichte's Addresses (ISOT-ISOS). While serfdom and the old system of social classes were being abolished in Prussia at- tempts were being made to rouse the national spirit of the Ger- mans and prepare them to fight against their French conquerors, A leader in this movement was the well-known philosopher Fichte. He arranged a course of public addresses in Berlin, just after the defeat at Jena, in which he told his auditors, with impressive warmth and eloquence, that the Germans were the one really superior people in the whole world. All other nations were degraded and had, he was confident, seen their best days ; but the future belonged to the Germans, who would in due time, owing to their supreme natural gifts, come into their own and be recognized as the leaders of the world. The German language was, he claimed, infinitely stronger than the feeble speech of the French and Italians, borrowed from ancient Latin, Unhappily, later German writers, as we shall see, have followed Fichte's lead in cultivating the Germans' self-esteem and their contempt for every other race. 834. Battle of Leipzig (October, 1813). Napoleon had to face now not only the kings and the cabinets of Europe and the regular armies that they directed but a people who were being organized to defend their country. The campaign which followed is known in Germany as the War of Liberation. Napoleon's sol- diers were, however, still triumphant for a time. He gained his last great victory, the battle of Dresden, August 26-27. Finding that the allied armies of the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians,