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.