Show The White Feather “I’ve long guessed . . . that we should find a white feather in thy tail.”—”On Bull-baiting,” Houlston Tracts (1825). To “show the white feather” means to display a mark of inferiority in the moral sphere. : a lack of courage befote an enemy. This is the reason that during the Great War certain young ladies who constituted themselves the guardians of the nation’s manhood, no less...