Hind Swaraj (1909), chapter XVI
The Seed and the Tree
In November 1909 Mahatma Gandhi boarded the steamship Kildonan Castle in England to sail back to South Africa. He had spent four months in London trying to get rights for Indians in the Transvaal, and the trip had failed. While he was there, Madan Lal Dhingra shot an English official named Sir Curzon Wyllie dead, and young Indian men in London told Gandhiji that murder was the only way left to win freedom. Gandhiji sat down at a small table on the ship with his friend Hajee Habib. Over ten days he wrote a book in Gujarati to answer them.
The young revolutionaries believed a good goal excuses any path you take to reach it. Gandhiji said that was like expecting to grow a rose from a weed. 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." You do not walk through cruelty and come out fair at the end. The tools you pick shape the outcome before you even arrive. If you use fear to win, you end up with a house built on fear.
Therefore
Pay attention to the way you chase what you want. The habits you practice along the road are the exact things waiting for you when you get there.
Indian Opinion, December 1909
Gandhiji wrote the whole manuscript on ship stationery, filling two hundred and seventy-five sheets and switching to his left hand when his right hand grew tired. In December 1909 he published the text in parts in Indian Opinion, his weekly paper in South Africa, and printed it as a booklet in January. Two months later the British authorities in Bombay banned the Gujarati booklet because it urged people not to obey violent commands. Gandhiji then translated the entire book into English so the government could read his argument for itself. He kept the line about the seed and the tree in every edition.
A small reminder, on the notebook or the desk, that the way you do the work decides what the work becomes.
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