A LEADER OF LEADERS.
From the “Philadelphia Times.”
The death of Henry W. Grady, chief editor of the Atlanta Constitution, is an irreparable loss to the South. Of all the many and influential newspaper men of that section, Mr. Grady can only be compared with Mr. Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, in point of distinction; and while Watterson is the better equipped journalist, Grady was the greater popular leader. He was not only a brilliant and forceful writer, but a most eloquent and impressive speaker, and one of the most sagacious in council.
Mr. Grady was only ten years old when the civil war spread its terrible pall over the land, and he was only a school-boy when his native South was left defeated, desolated and despairing by the failure of the Confederacy. He grew up with the new generation that is so rapidly succeeding the actors of that great conflict in both sections. He escaped the luxury and effeminacy of fortune; he had to grapple with poverty amidst an almost hopeless people; and he was one of the earliest of the new generation to rise to the full stature of manly duty. Thoroughly Southern in sympathy, and keenly sharing the memories which are sacred to all who wore and supported the gray, he saw the new occasion with its new duties as the latent wealth of the South, that so long slumbered under the blight of slavery, gave promise of development; and alike in his own Empire State of the South, and in the great metropolis of the Union and in the Bay State citadel of opposite political views, he ever declared the same sentiments and cemented the bond of common brotherhood.
And no other young man of the South gave so much promise of future honors and usefulness as did Mr. Grady. He has fallen ere he had reached the full noontide of life, and when his public career was just at its threshold. He could have been United States Senator at the last election had he not given his plighted faith to another; and even with the office left to go by default, it was with reluctance that the Legislature, fresh from the people, passed him by in obedience to his own command. That he would have been leader of leaders in the South, yea, in the whole Union, is not doubted; and he was the one man of the present in the South who might have been called to the Vice-Presidency had his life been spared. He was free from the blemish of the Confederate Brigadier, that is ever likely to be an obstacle to a popular election to the Presidency or Vice-Presidency, and he was so thoroughly and so grandly typical of the New South, with its new pulsations, its new progress, its new patriotism, that his political promotion seemed plainly written in the records of fate.
But Henry W. Grady has fallen in the journey with his face yet looking to the noonday sun, and it is only the vindication of truth to say that he leaves no one who can fully take his place. Other young men of the South will have their struggling paths brightened by the refulgence his efforts and achievements reflect upon them, but to-day his death leaves a gap in Southern leadership that will not be speedily filled. And he will be mourned not only by those who sympathized with him in public effort. He was one of the most genial, noble and lovable of men in every relation of life, and from the homes of Georgia, and from the by-ways of the sorrowing as well as from the circles of ambition, there will be sobbing hearts over the grave of Henry W. Grady.