strange caprice. But though there is inequality of natural gifts, he
thought it was the duty of the State to ensure equality of opportunity
to all its citizens. His ideal was a co-operative commonwealth, in
which the competitive spirit would be held in check by communal needs
and aims, and where every career would be opened freely to talent. In
one of his essays he deplores the fact that political economists had
fallen into the delusion of applying the laws that govern the
exchange of commodities without any variation to Labour, and leaving
out of account intangibles and imponderables like moral forces and
other expressions of the delicate and mysterious human spirit.
Political economy, he thought, would have to be recast and humanised.
"The economists," he said, "have entirely ignored the human factor."

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 ma