Lack of courage is a lack of vision or clear-headedness about what one wants.  I do not know, but I can only say that it has seemed to me that Bishop Gore has a vision or clear-headedness about what he wants for democracy, and that he uses his vision of what he wants for democracy to true his vision for his class.  Perhaps also he has a vision for his class for the church people that it is for the interest church people to be the class that is, out of all the world, supremely considerate, big, leisurely, unfretful in its dealings with others.  Perhaps also he has a vision for himself and is clear-headed for himself, and has seen that though the steeples fall about him, and though the altars go up in smoke, he will keep the spirit of God still within his reach.  The gentleness, the grim hope for the world and the patience that built the cathedrals, shall be in his heart day and night.

I hold no brief for Bishop Gore.

I know there must be others like him who voted on the other side.

I know there are hundreds of thousands of employers who in their hearts are like him.  I know there are hundreds of thousands of men in the trades unions who are like him.

I am not sure that Bishop Gore, on the merits of the case, was right.  I wish this day I knew that he was wrong.  I wish that I had spent the last six months in fighting him, in fighting against his vision, that I might be more free to-day to point to him with joy when I go up and down the streets with men and look at the churches with men—­the rows of churches—­and try to tell them what they are for.  I have seen that the cathedrals scattered about under the sky in England are but God’s little tools to make great cities on the earth, and to build softly out of the hearts of men and women men who shall be cathedrals too—­men buttressed against the world, men who can stand alone.

And it has seemed to me that Tom Mann and D.A.  Thomas are incompetent as leaders of industry because they do not see that Labour is full of men who can do things like this.  I am proud, over in my country across the sea, to be cousin to a nation that is still the headquarters—­the international citadel—­of individualism upon the earth.  The world knows if England does not, that this kind of individualism is the most characteristic, the most mighty and impregnable Dreadnought against that England has produced.

But England knows it too.

I have seen thousands of men in England in their dull brown clothes pass by me in the street who know and respond to the spirit that is in Bishop Gore, and who have the courage to show it themselves.  And the vision is in them, but it is not waked.  The moment it is waked we will have a new world.  It is because Tom Mann and D.A.  Thomas are not leaders of men who have this spirit that they are about to be dropped as typical leaders of Labour and Capital in modern times.  No man will be accepted by the Crowd to-day as a competent leader of his class