Sir Stafford Cripps

Chancellor of the Exchequer

Stood out head and shoulders above contemporaries May not the whole world learn from his life something of fundamental value: that it is idle to try to save ourselves from destruction by the use of force and that our greatest weapon of salvation is the supreme and redeeming power of love.

...Non-violence for him was not a negative policy; it was much more than that. It was the determination that the power of love should triumph, a determination based upon a deep and unshakable belief in that power. He never took the view that he must divorce his religion from his everyday life. Religion was his life and his life was his religion..

He was no simple missionary. Combined with his religious outlook was his lawyer-trained mind, quick and apt for reasoning. He was a formidable opponent for argument and would often take up the attitude that his views and the policy he was advocating had come to him in his meditations from God and then no reasoning upon earth could make him depart from them.

...He stood out head and shoulders above all his contemporaries as one who believed and who fearlessly put his beliefs into practice. I know no other man of any time or indeed in recent history who forcefully and convincingly demonstrated the power of the spirit over material things.