A SOUTHERN BEREAVEMENT.
From the “Cincinnati Times-Star.”
The loss which the Daily Constitution sustains in the death of Mr. Grady is not a loss to a newspaper company only; it is a loss to Atlanta, to Georgia, to the whole South. Mr. Grady belonged to a new era of things south of the Ohio River. He was never found looking over his shoulder in order to keep in sympathy with the people among whom he had always lived. He was more than abreast of the times in the South, he kept a little in advance, and his spirit was rapidly becoming contagious. He wasted no time sighing over the past, he was getting all there is of life in the present and preparing for greater things for himself and the South in the future. His life expectancy was great, for though already of national reputation he had not yet reached his prime.
There was much of the antithetical in the lives of the two representative Southern men who have but just passed away. The one lived in the past, the other in the future. The one saw but little hope for Southern people because the “cause” was “lost,” the other believed in a mightier empire still because the Union was preserved. The one, full of years, had finished his course, which had been full of mistakes. The other had not only kept the faith, but had barely entered upon a course that was full of promise. The one was the ashes of the past, the other, like the orange-tree of his own sunny clime, had the ripe fruit of the present and the bud of the future. The death of the one was long since discounted, the death of the other comes like a sudden calamity in a happy Christmas home. The North joins the South to-day in mourning for Grady.