The True Value of Recognition — The Essays of Montaigne

Writers of the life of Augustus Caesar note that he was wonderfully liberal of gifts to men of merit, yet as sparing with the true recompenses of honour, though his uncle had already given him all the military honours before he had ever been in the field. Most governments invent vain and in themselves valueless distinctions to honour virtue: crowns of laurel, oak, and myrtle; a particular fashion of garment; the privilege to ride in a coach in the city, or at night with a torch; a peculiar place in public assemblies; extra names, titles, and coats of arms.

France and its neighbours institute orders of knighthood for the same end, and men of quality have always been more jealous of such honours than of rewards with gain in them. Mix riches with the honour and the mixture debases it. The Order of Saint Michael long held repute because it had no communication with any other commodity. Gentry pretended to it with more desire than to any office. Money pays a servant, a courier, dancing, vaulting, even flattery and pimping. Virtue less willingly receives that common payment. Augustus had reason to be more sparing of honour than of gifts, because honour derives its principal essence from rarity, and so does virtue. No one commends a citizen of Sparta for valour when valour is the universal virtue of the nation. There is no recompense that becomes virtue once it has passed into a custom.

Seeing that these remunerations have no value but that few people enjoy them, to be liberal of them is to bring them down to nothing. Even if more men now merit the order, the honour should not be made cheap. Military valour spreads easily. The civil wars have already made it common. The old recompense regarded not a valiant soldier but a great captain, for the arts of soldiery and generalship are not the same. Better to fall short and give it to no one than to lose, as France has lately done, the fruit of so profitable an invention. Men of spirit will not deign to share what is common with many. Those who have least merited it now make the greater show of disdaining it. To abolish the old order and suddenly create a like institution in so sick a time is to give the new one the same contempt from birth. The rules would need extreme restriction, and this tumultuous season cannot hold such a curb. French court style uses a man of high worth and a good man to mean a valiant man, as Rome drew virtue from force. The same nation calls a good woman only a chaste woman, as if that one duty compounded for the rest.