In the pursuit of virtue, is it safer to be honest, or is it wiser to be effective?

Safer or wiser? These are not the questions that concern me. The question is: what is true? And what flows from that truth? To be effective without honesty is to build a house on sand. It may stand for a time, but when the storm comes, it will surely fall. I wrote in *Hind Swaraj* of the essential connection between means and ends. We reap as we sow. If we sow the seeds of dishonesty, we shall reap a harvest of corruption and mistrust, no matter how temporarily effective the dishonesty may have seemed. The way of truth may seem dangerous, but it is the only path to lasting good. It is the path of satyagraha.

The question is not whether honesty is safe but whether safety is the supreme consideration. I have heard men argue that appeasement was the wiser course in the 1930s because it was safer than confronting Hitler. We know how that calculation turned out. Pope's honest man may be vulnerable, and Shakespeare's directness may invite danger, but a nation, like a man, that places safety above all else is doomed. Virtue without effectiveness is a sermon without a congregation, but effectiveness without virtue is a menace. The choice is not between the two, but how to hold them in balance. I chose to speak plainly about the Nazi danger when many preferred to look away. That was not the safe course, but it was the necessary one.