is latter remedy could not be of more lasting use than the
famous edict of Diocletian, thirteen hundred years before. The
compulsion which, for example, it exercised over the city weekly
markets, day labourers, and guilds, was only a temporary help for
restoring the overflowing stream to its old bed.

This state of intoxication, terror, and fury was followed by a dreary
reaction. Men gazed on one another as after a great pestilence. Those
who had rested secure in their opulence had sunk into ruin. Many
worthless adventurers now strutted, as persons of distinction, in
velvet and silk. The whole nation had become poorer. There had not been
any great war for a long time, and many millions in silver and gold,
the savings of the inferior classes, had been inherited in city and
village from father to son; the greater part of these savings had
vanished in the bad times; it had been squandered on carousals,
frittered away on trifles, and at last expended for daily food. But
this was not the greatest evil; it was a still greater, that at this
time the citizen, and countryman had been forcibly torn from the path
of their honest daily labour. Frivolity, an unsettled existence, and a
reckless egotism, had taken possession of them. The destroying powers
of war had sent forth their evil spirits to loosen the firm links of
burgher society, and to accustom a peaceful, upright, and laborious
people to the sufferings and mal-practices of an army which shortly
overran all Germany.

The period from 1621 to 1623 was henceforth called the "_Kipper and
Wipper_" time. The confusion, the excitement, the trafficking, and the
flying-sheet literature lasted till the year 1625. The lessons which
the princes had learnt from the consequences of their flagitious
actions did not avail them against later temptations. Even at the end
of the seventeenth century it seems to have been impossible for them
entirely to avoid hedge mints, and the continual recurrence of a
depreciation of money.

Whilst Tilly was conquering Lower Saxony, and Wallenstein made great
havoc in Northern Germany, small literature flowed in an under-current.
After every engagement, and every capture of a city, there appeared
copper engravings, with a text which described the position of the
troops and the appearance of the city; irregular newspapers, and songs
of lament conveyed the information of the advance of the Imperialists,
and the destruction of the Mansfelders. In the midst