EDITOR, ORATOR, STATESMAN, PATRIOT.
From the “Kansas City Globe.”
In the death of Henry W. Grady the South has lost one of its foremost and best men. He was pre-eminently the foremost man of the South, and to the credit of the section it can be said that he had not attained to such a position by services in the past, but by duty conceived and well discharged in the present. He was not a creature of the war, but was born of the events succeeding the war and which, in turn, he has helped to shape for the good of the South, in a way that has represented a sentiment which has induced immigration and the investment of capital, so that, short as has been the span of his life of usefulness, it has been long enough to see the realization of his greatest ambition and hopes—the South redeemed from the despair of defeat and made a prosperous part of a great nation and a factor in working out a glorious future for a reunited people.
Intensely Southern in his sentiments, devotedly attached to his section and as proud of it in poverty and defeat as in the day of its present prosperity, to which he much contributed, Henry W. Grady comprehended the situation as soon as man’s estate allowed him to begin the work of his life, and he set about making a New South, in no sense, as he claimed in his famous Boston speech, in disparagement of the Old South, but because new ideas had taken root, because of new conditions; and the new ideas he cultivated to a growth that opened a better sentiment throughout the South, produced a better appreciation of Southern sentiment in the North, and helped to harmonize the difference between the sections that war sought to divide, but which failing still left “a bloody chasm” to be spanned or filled up. That it is obliterated along with the ramparts of fortresses and the earthworks of the war, is as much due, or more, to Henry W. Grady than any man who has lived in the South, a survivor of the war, or brought out of its sequences into prominence.
Early appreciating the natural advantages, the undeveloped resources of the South, he has advocated as editor and orator the same fostering care of Southern industry that has enabled the North to become the manufacturing competitor with any people of the world. He sought, during his life, to allay the political prejudice of the South and the political suspicion of the North, and to bring each section to a comprehension of the mutual advantages that would arise from the closest social and business relations. He fought well, wrote convincingly and spoke eloquently to this end, and dying, though in the very prime of his usefulness, he closed his eyes upon work well done, upon a New South that will endure as a nobler and better monument to his memory than would the Confederacy, if it had succeeded, have been for Jefferson Davis.
The South has lost its ablest and best exponent, the representative of the South as it is, and the whole country has lost a noble character, whose sanctified mission, largely successful, was to make the country one in sentiment, as it is in physical fact.