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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: remember. With the girls, he had 'constant fierce wrangles,'
forcing them to reason out their thoughts and to explain their
prepossessions; and I hear from Miss Gaskell that they used to
wonder how he could throw all the ardour of his character into the
smallest matters, and to admire his unselfish devotion to his
parents. Of one of these wrangles, I have found a record most
characteristic of the man. Fleeming had been laying down his
doctrine that the end justifies the means, and that it is quite
right 'to boast of your six men-servants to a burglar or to steal a
knife to prevent a murder'; and the Miss Gaskells, with girlish
loyalty to what is current, had rejected the heresy with
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