But he would be mistaken.  Ochterlony was a man, not a battle.  And he did good and honorable service, too; as good and honorable service as has been done in India by seventy-five or a hundred other Englishmen of courage, rectitude, and distinguished capacity.  For India has been a fertile breeding-ground of such men, and remains so; great men, both in war and in the civil service, and as modest as great.  But they have no monuments, and were not expecting any.  Ochterlony could not have been expecting one, and it is not at all likely that he desired one—­certainly not until Clive and Hastings should be supplied.  Every day Clive and Hastings lean on the battlements of heaven and look down and wonder which of the two the monument is for; and they fret and worry because they cannot find out, and so the peace of heaven is spoiled for them and lost.  But not for Ochterlony.  Ochterlony is not troubled.  He doesn’t suspect that it is his monument.  Heaven is sweet and peaceful to him.  There is a sort of unfairness about it all.

Indeed, if monuments were always given in India for high achievements, duty straitly performed, and smirchless records, the landscape would be monotonous with them.  The handful of English in India govern the Indian myriads with apparent ease, and without noticeable friction, through tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by just and liberal laws—­and by keeping their word to the native whenever they give it.

England is far from India and knows little about the eminent services performed by her servants there, for it is the newspaper correspondent who makes fame, and he is not sent to India but to the continent, to report the doings of the princelets and the dukelets, and where they are visiting and whom they are marrying.  Often a British official spends thirty or forty years in India, climbing from grade to grade by services which would make him celebrated anywhere else, and finishes as a vice-sovereign, governing a great realm and millions of subjects; then he goes home to England substantially unknown and unheard of, and settles down in some modest corner, and is as one extinguished.  Ten years later there is a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the reader is paralyzed by the splendors of a career which he is not sure that he had ever heard of before.  But meanwhile he has learned all about the continental princelets and dukelets.

The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from his own.  When they are mentioned in his presence one or two facts and maybe a couple of names rise like torches in his mind, lighting up an inch or two of it and leaving the rest all dark.  The mention of Egypt suggests some Biblical facts and the Pyramids-nothing more.  The mention of South Africa suggests Kimberly and the diamonds and there an end.  Formerly the mention, to a Hindoo, of America suggested a name—­George Washington—­with