If wine and beer were dearer than usual, they were not so in the same proportion as the old silver money. Part of the gains were jovially spent in the public-house. Every one was disposed to give, in those times. The Saxon cities readily agreed, at the Diet at Torgau, to a great addition to the land tax, as money was to be obtained everywhere in superfluity. People also were very ready to contract debts, for money was offered everywhere, and business could be done with it on favourable conditions; great obligations therefore were undertaken on all sides. Thus a powerful stream carried away the people to destruction. But a counter stream arose, first gentle, then continually stronger. Those were first to complain who had to live on a fixed income, the parish priests most loudly, the schoolmasters and poor misanthropes most bitterly. Those who had formerly lived respectably on two hundred gulden, good Imperial coin, now only received two hundred light gulden, and if, as often undoubtedly happened, the salary of some were raised about a quarter in amount, they could not even with this addition defray half, nay even the fourth part, of the necessary expenses. Upon this unprecedented occasion the ecclesiastics referred to the Bible, and found there an indisputable objection to all hedge minting, and began to preach from their pulpits against light money. The schoolmasters starved in the villages as long as they could, then ran away and increased the train of vagabonds, beggars, and soldiers; the servants next became discontented. The wages, which averaged ten gulden a year, hardly sufficed to pay for their shoes. In every house there were quarrels between them and their masters and mistresses. Men and maid-servants ran away, the men enlisted and the maids endeavoured to set up for themselves. Meanwhile the youths dispersed from the schools and universities, few parents among the citizens being sufficiently well off to be able to support their sons entirely during the period of education. There were however a multitude of scholarships founded by benevolent people for poor students. The value of these now suddenly vanished, the credit of the poor scholars in foreign towns was soon exhausted, many found it impossible to maintain themselves; they sank under poverty and the temptations of that bloody period. We may still read in the autobiographies of many respectable theologians, what distress they then suffered. One supported life in Vienna, by cutting daily his master's tallies for a four-penny loaf; another was able to earn eighteen batz[35] in the week, by giving lessons, the whole of which he was obliged to spend on dry bread.