In Montreal today, I walked through Dorchester Square, enjoying its feast for lovers of historical monuments. Simply on aesthetic grounds, this is one of my favourites in all of Canada.

Remarkably, it’s a monument to Canadian soldiers who fought and died in the Boer War, a conflict soon overshadowed by the First World War, then forgotten. But that fact underscores one reason why I love monuments like these: They speak to the time and place of the people who erected them. When the monument becomes anachronistic its value is not lost, it simply shifts from expressing the views of the surrounding community to expressing the history of those views.