Every one knows that this saying has been offered by true believers in multitudes of causes as justification for their violent deeds. A bad tree, however, as Jesus Christ pointed out, produces bad fruit. Evil means lead to evil ends. To this statement, no one could object. For only by the actual outcome of a course of action can we verify whether the action was valid or not.
Human deeds justify, or condemn, themselves by their consequences.
A man may campaign for peace, yet parade about so angrily in his peace demonstra tions that all he accomplishes in the end is the disruption of everybody s peace, including his own. A nation may see no harm in destroying its forests to get wood, but the consequences of the act will demonstrate that great harm was done to the ecology. In this case, the end obtaining wood for fireplaces and for the construction of houses clearly did not justify the means used. On the other side, if Fulton was ridiculed for building a ship made of metal, the fact that it floated once it was launched was all the justification he needed for his invention. A course of action is justified if its results are consis tently good.