HIS LOFTY IDEAL.
From the “Philadelphia Press.”
Few men die at thirty-eight whose departure is felt as a national loss, but Henry W. Grady was one. At an age when most men are just beginning to be known in their own States and to be recognized in their own section, he was known to the nation and recognized by the American people. At the South he represented the new pride in the material revival of a section desolated by the war. At the North he stood for loyal and enthusiastic support by the South of the new claims of the Union. His every appearance before the public was one more proof to the nation that the sons of those who fought the war were again one people and under one flag, cherishing different memories in the past, but pressing forward to the same lofty ideal of a homogeneous democratic society under republican institutions.
If Henry W. Grady spoke at the North he spoke for the South; if he spoke at the South he stood for Northern ideas in his own land. He was none the less true in both attitudes that his utterances were insensibly modified by his audiences. Eloquent, magnetic, impressionable, sharing to the full the sympathy every great speaker always has with his audience, his sentiment swung from extreme to extreme as he stood on a Northern or a Southern platform. It was always easy to pick flaws in them. Now and then his rhetorical sympathies placed him in a false position. But it was the inevitable condition of work like his that he should express extremes. If he had not felt and voiced the pride with which every Southerner must and should look back to the deathless valor of men we all rejoice to claim as Americans, he would have been worthless as a representative of the South. If he had not thrilled earlier than his fellows to the splendid national heritage with which defeat had dowered his people, he could never have awakened the applause of Northern audiences by expressions of loyalty and devotion to our common nation.
This service to both sections sprang from something more than sympathy. A moral courage Northern men can little understand was needed for him to oppose Southern treatment of the negro. Energy and industry, unknown among his fellows, were needed in the leadership he undertook in the material development of his State and section. It is easy now to see the enormous profit which lay in the material development of Georgia. Far-sighted provision was needed to urge the policy and aid the combination which made it possible ten years ago.
No one but a journalist, we are proud to say, could have done Mr. Grady’s work, and he brought to the work of journalism some of its highest qualifications. Ability as a writer, keen appreciation of “news,” and tireless industry, which he had, must all be held second to the power he possessed in an eminent degree of divining the drift and tendency of public feeling, being neither too early to lead it nor too late to control it. This divination Mr. Grady was daily displaying and he never made better use of it than in his last speech in Boston, the best of his life, in which he rose from mere rhetoric to a clear, earnest and convincing handling of fact. A great future was before him, all too soon cut off. He leaves to all journalists the inspiring example of the great opportunities which their profession offers to serve the progress of men and aid the advance of nations, by speaking to the present of the bright and radiant light of the future, and rising above the claims of party and the prejudice of locality to advocate the higher claims of patriotism and humanity.