Merit is the natural right we have to be rewarded; demerit the natural right that others have to punish us, and, if we may thus speak, the right that we have to be punished. This expression may seem paradoxical, nevertheless it is true. A culpable man, who, opening his eyes to the light of the good, should comprehend the necessity of expiation, not only by internal repentance, without which all the rest is in vain, but also by a real and effective suffering, such a culpable man would have the right to claim the punishment that alone can reconcile him with order. And such reclamations are not so rare. Do we not every day see criminals denouncing themselves and offering themselves up to avenge the public? Others prefer to satisfy justice, and do not have recourse to the pardon that law places in the hands of the monarch in order to represent in the state charity and mercy, as tribunals represent in it justice. This is a manifest proof of the natural and profound roots of the idea of punishment and reward. Merit and demerit imperatively claim, like a lawful debt, punishment and reward; but reward must not be confounded with merit, nor punishment with demerit; this would be confounding cause and effect, principle and consequence. Even were reward and punishment not to take place, merit and demerit would subsist. Punishment and reward satisfy merit and demerit, but do not constitute them. Suppress all reward and all punishment and you do not thereby suppress merit and demerit; on the contrary, suppress merit and demerit, and there are no longer true punishments and true rewards. Unmerited goods and honors are only material advantages; reward is essentially moral, and its value is independent of its form. One of those crowns of oak that the early Romans decreed to heroism is worth more than all the riches in the world, when it is the sign of the recognition and the admiration of a people. To reward is to give in return. He who is rewarded must have first given something in order to deserve to be rewarded. Reward accorded to merit is a debt; reward without merit is a charity or a theft. It is the same with punishment. It is the relation of pain to a fault,--in this relation, and not in the pain alone, is the truth as well as the shame of chastisement. 'Tis crime and not the scaffold makes the shame.[228] There are two things that must be unceasingly repeated, because they are equally true,--the first is, that the good is good in itself, and ought to be pursued whatever may be the consequences; the second is, that the consequences of the good cannot fail to be fortunate. Happiness, separated from the good, is only a fact to which is attached no moral idea; but, as an effect of the good, it enters into the moral order and completes it.