Quote Originally Posted by MacMillan of Rathdown View Post
That would be the case if I advocated only one heraldic authority as "valid", but I haven't done that. There are better than a dozen heraldic authorities in Europe, plus one in Canada and one more in the Republic of South Africa, and yet another in Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean. Each of these administers it's affairs according to it's own lights, with varying degrees of difficulty in obtaining a personal grant of arms (ranging from "easy" in the RSA to "impossible" in the Russian Federation), and each one is to be regarded as valid.

If tomorrow a new office of arms were to pop up in Mexico City, as a result of government initiative, it too would be regarded as "valid" by all of the other government-sponsored heraldic authorities.

And here, I think, is the crux of the problem.

As Mark Twain once said, "There are two kinds of people in the world; good people and bad people. The problem arises because it's the good people who decide who's who." It's the same in heraldry. The standards that are applied have nothing to do with the quality of armoury, and everything to do with the governmental standing of the office that created that armorial achievement. It may be unfair (and in my opinion it is) but that's how the system works.
But that's not the case, Scott. Focusing just on Europe for the moment, there are government authorized heraldic authorities currently operating in Belgium, Ireland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom. There is one in Russia, but it is their current policy not to involve themselves with personal heraldry. There are no sanctioned heraldic authority in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland. These are all states where there is, however, some level of heraldic activity. Are you really suggesting that the people who bear arms in these countries are not "valid" in doing so? Seriously?