Paul's conviction was that when the rule of enlightened democracy was established wars would cease. "The peoples never want wars," he wrote; "under a pure democracy wars would be impossible." Because of the associations clustering around it the word "Imperialism" jarred on him, but he took pride in the greatness of the free and liberal British Empire, with its rule of law, its love of peace, its humane ideals. He had the historical sense in highly developed degree. The story of human progress stretched before the eye of his mind in a series of vivid pictures. Surveying the immense and imposing fabric of recorded events woven by the ceaseless loom of Time, he had an unerring instinct for the shining figures, the salient characteristic, the determining factor. Away from a library he could have written a quite tolerable essay on any century of the Christian era. Historical characters in whom he was specially interested were Julius Caesar, Octavius, Charlemagne, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Louis XIV, the elder Pitt, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon; and among the non-political Roger Bacon, Erasmus, Luther, Sir Thomas More, Isaac Newton, Faraday, and Darwin. The Elizabethan age had for him a magnetic attraction, because of the Queen with her enigmatical personality, marvellous statecraft and capacity for inspiring devotion, and of the brilliant galaxy of great men, statesmen and sailors, poets and scholars, who enriched her reign with so much glory. Another epoch he loved to study was that of the French Revolution. I have already referred to his habit of annotating the books he read. From notes he made on political books and from some of his essays I have culled the following: Man's tool-using power is simply a symbol of man's unique reasoning gifts. Its connotations may be extended to mean the entire intellect. The savage using his language with joy like a child, gives us the wealth of beautiful mythology about all natural objects. It is wonderful to think that Julius Caesar's imperial system was handed right down to the nineteenth century, until one not unlike Caesar himself set his foot upon its neck in 1806. But long before it fell the Holy Roman Empire had really ceased, in Voltaire's words, to be holy, or Roman, or an empire. Froude holds up to admiration the "serene calmness" of Tacitus, and says he took no side. But I ask anyone who has read the sarcastic remarks about Domitian and the Emperors in the "Agricola" whether he thinks Tacitus took no side in writing history. Nothing can alter the fact that Mohammedanism has done a vast amount of good. Compare Carlyle's appreciation of Mahomet with Gibbon's acrimonious insinuations. Much that is strange in human history is explained if we remember that aristocracies in the West were political, while in the East they were religious.