Further individual aid was given to the new idea of personal liberty for all conditions of men by an apostle of freedom, Arnold of Brescia. This eloquent pupil of the French monk Abelard, the enlightened philosopher, the lover of Heloïse, himself a priest, was the most powerful opponent of the clerical ideas in the twelfth century, which tried to keep down the people in order that through their ignorance and dependence they might be ruled with absolute and unquestioned sway--ideas by no means wholly extinct to this day among this class of men. Banished by the Pope as a political and ecclesiastical heretic, Arnold fled to Southern Germany, where he preached his doctrines to eager ears, and roused an enthusiasm that laid the train for a later Church reformation, and helped towards the development of a new social state. He awakened or fostered the thought of personal liberty, a liberty not only consistent with corporate union, but part and parcel of the same; a condition alone worthy a rational human being, who, while doing whatever pleases him best, never loses sight of the fact that he has only a right to follow this desire so long as his liberty does not trench upon that of his neighbour and brother man. [Illustration: SALTERS' HALL, FRANKFORT. (_From an engraving in the British Museum._)] John Stuart Mill had not yet defined the meaning of the much abused term, liberty; Madame Roland had not yet ejaculated upon the scaffold her true and piteous cry, "Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!" but Arnold of Brescia understood the meaning of the word, and what was equally important, he made his hearers understand it too. He did not merely preach vague doctrines, he preached sound political economy and social ethics. And thus the Germans learnt from the Italians both the true meaning of liberty and the virtue of municipal institutions, which latter had, in the first instance, sprung up in Lombardy from a Germanic root; its essential features being a free choice of the civic rulers from the fittest elements, a right to govern themselves, and if need be to form alliances, and the right to tax themselves. Further, they learnt to recognize the principle that the final decision should not rest with one person, but with the mass of the inhabitants. This autonomy in all inner affairs, founded on Italian models, became in the course of several generations the most cherished possession of all those German cities whence sprang the Hanseatic League. There was, however, this difference that, unlike the Lombard cities, the Germans ever acknowledged the supremacy of the emperor, and never developed either into complete oligarchies or democracies, though in their statutes when they were at the height of their power, it was distinctly stated that decisions in important matters did not rest "with the general council, but with the people." [Illustration: MEDIÆVAL CITY. (_From a drawing by Albert Dürer._)]