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.
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.