Their last resting-places are side by side, as they should be, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and side by side their glorious memories will remain as long as the noble qualities which made them the greatest men, not only of their nation, but of the age which their great deeds made splendid, are held in honour--and that is the same thing as saying as long as the human race endures. XI “_CHINESE GORDON_” “_HONOUR--NOT HONOURS_” XI “CHINESE GORDON” We are living rather too near to the days of the man himself, to be able to say what place History will ultimately assign to the greatest and most famous of the old fighting stock of the Gordons. Probably the discriminating historian of the day after to-morrow will look upon him ethnologically as a queer survival or throwback--a man who lived and did his work in the nineteenth century in the style of the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth. In the military sense he would seem to be the last of our great soldiers of fortune--for soldier of fortune he undoubtedly was far more than soldier of Britain--and the work that he did as one of the makers of the British Empire was done under foreign flags. It might, indeed, be asked by the superficial observer in what sense he was an Empire-Maker at all, or what right he has to claim a place in that long and splendid array of great men, only a few of whom can be silhouetted within the limits of such a volume as this and whose succession stretches through the centuries from William, Duke of Normandy to Cecil John Rhodes of Rhodesia. The answer is plain enough, though not very obvious at first sight. The British Empire is twofold. It is not only the greatest concrete Fact that the world has ever seen; it is also a vast and very splendid Idea, and in this sense it covers, not only just that portion of the earth’s surface over which the Union Jack flies, but also every other land known and half-known, old and new, civilised and savage, into which the genius of the Anglo-Saxon has forced its way and over which it has exercised that peculiar influence for which the word “English” stands in the dictionaries of our foreign competitors. Charles George Gordon never added a square yard to the British Empire, considered as a geographical expression. He very seldom fought at the head of British troops, and when he did, it was not to any very great purpose--in fact his witnessing of the murder of many hundreds of gallant British soldiers by the officials who were guilty of the criminal mismanagement of the Crimean War was about the sum total of his experiences of warfare under the Flag.