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Consensus Decision-making/37 ene Editor: Your reasoning is plausible. It has deluded many. I have used similar arguments before now. But I think I know better now. and I shall endeavor to undeceive you. Let us first take the argument that we are justified in gaining our end by using brute force because the English gained theirs by using similar means. It is perfectly true that they used brute force and that it is possible for us to do likewise, but by using similar means we can get only the same thing that they got. You will admit that we do not want that. Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake. Through that mistake even men who have been considered religious have committed grievous crimes. Your reasoning is the same as saying that we can get a rose through planting a noxious weed. If I want to cross the ocean, I can do so only by means of a vessel; if I were to use a cart for that purpose, both the cart and I would soon find the bottom. "As is the God, so is the votary”, is a maxim worth considering. Its meaning has been distorted and men have gone astray. The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same invioTable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. I am not likely to obtain the result Tlowing from the worship of God by laying myself prostrate be de Satan. If, therefore, anyone were to say: "I want to worship vod; it does not matter that I do so by means of Satan," it would be set down as ignorant folly. We reap exactly as we sow. The English in 1833 obtained greater voting power by violence. Did ney by using brute force better appreciate their duty? They wanted the right of voting, which they obtained by using physical force. ut real rights are a result of performance of duty; these rights ney have not obtained. We, therefore, have before us in England e force of everybody wanting and insisting on his rights, nopay thinking of his duty. And, where everybody wants rights, ho shall give them to whom? I do not wish to imply that they o duties. They don't perform the duties corresponding to those its; and as they do not perform that particular duty, namely, uire fitness, their rights have proved a burden to them. In other