GRADY’S RENOWN.
From the “Birmingham News.”
No such universality of personal poignant sorrow ever pervaded a city as that which overshadows the capital of Georgia. There, everybody knew Henry Grady, and it was not the journalist and orator and statesman they saluted familiarly everywhere—in public assemblies and on the streets and at their firesides. Every home in the city was in fact the home of the kindly, generous, laughing philosopher, whose business it was to make his people happy, his city prosperous, and his State the foremost of Southern commonwealths.
And then his grand purpose in life was the restoration of the unity and integrity of the States. His speeches in New York and Boston, that will live as long as unhappy memories of inter-State hostilities, which he proposed to dissipate forever, followed one another naturally. The first portrayed the necessity for a perfect Federal Union. The second and last defined the only method of achieving it. The first paved the way for a presidential contest, from which sectional issues were almost wholly eviscerated. President Cleveland was so thoroughly imbued with the sentiment and purpose of Grady’s oration at the New England dinner in New York that he hazarded, or sacrificed, deliberately the certainty of partisan and personal triumph that the country might escape greater calamities, involved necessarily in a conflict in which African ex-slaves became the sole subject of passionate controversy and maddening declamation. The campaign was one of practical and not sentimental issues.
Everybody has read the recent more wonderful outburst of passionate eloquence that startled Boston and the East, and forced New England, for the first time, to contemplate the relations of races in the South as did Mr. Grady, and as do New Englanders themselves, having homes in the Gulf States. Facts propounded were unquestionable, palpable truths. There was no answer to his irrefragable logic. Grady’s matchless eloquence charmed every listener. His peroration will become the choicest specimen of impassioned oratory declaimed by schoolboys in every academy in which proper pedagogues inculcate proper patriotism in all this broad land.
Then came Grady’s death. It shocked the country that a man so gifted and the only American capable of pronouncing an oration as faultless as the philippics of Demosthenes, or as the sturdy, resistless orations of Gladstone, could not live immortal as his prophetic sentences that still illumine the brain and electrify the heart of an entire people.
Grady’s two speeches in the East, if he had never written or spoken aught else, would be the Leuctra and Mantinea, immortal victories and only daughters of an Epaminondas. If there survived no other children of Henry Grady’s genius than these two, his renown would be as lasting as the glory and greatness and peace of the Republic which he gave his life to assure.