Hind Swaraj (1909), chapter XVI
The Seed and the Tree
In November 1909 Mahatma Gandhi boarded the steamship Kildonan Castle at Southampton to sail back to Durban. He had spent four months in London trying to stop new laws against Indians in South Africa, and the British ministers had turned him down. While in London, he argued with young Indian students who wanted to free India by killing British officials. Madan Lal Dhingra had shot Sir Curzon Wyllie in July, and the students told him that murder was justified if the goal was freedom. On the voyage home, he sat down with ship stationery to write a book against them.
People often think they can cheat a little at work to get a promotion, or lie in a campaign to win an election. They believe the bad method disappears once they reach the goal. Gandhiji told them that a method never disappears. In chapter XVI of Hind Swaraj, he wrote: "The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree." If someone plants a bitter seed, they cannot pick sweet fruit later. The way a person works shapes the result before they ever arrive.
Therefore
Watch how you pursue a goal, not just whether you reach it. A dirty shortcut will ruin the thing you set out to build.
Indian Opinion, December 1909
Gandhiji wrote the whole dialogue in ten days, switching to his left hand when his right grew tired. He published the text in December 1909 in Indian Opinion, his paper in South Africa. British officials in Bombay believed the book encouraged rebellion, and in March 1910 they banned the Gujarati edition. To answer them, Gandhiji translated the text into English as Indian Home Rule and mailed a copy to the writer Leo Tolstoy. The English text proved the book argued against political violence rather than for it. The ban showed that governments feared any refusal to fight on their terms. Power always expects an army, and it gets confused when people answer force with patience.
A small reminder, on the desk or the notebook, that the way you do your work today decides what you end up with tomorrow.
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