His life was crowded with successful endeavor; in deeds, in achievement for his country and his people and in honors he was an old man. He had done in less than two-score years more than it is given to most men to do to the time of whitened hair and trembling limbs, and he had earned his rest. The world had little more to offer him but its inevitable cares and disappointments; the promise from his past was that he had much more to do for the world and his fellow-man. The loss is his country’s.
His whole country—and especially the South he loved so well—owes to his memory what it cannot now express to him—honor and gratitude.
His powerful presence is gone; the keen and watchful eyes are closed forever; the vibrant voice is hushed. But his words will live, his work will last and grow; his memory will stand high on the roll of the South’s sons who have wrought gloriously for her in war and in peace, who by valor or wisdom have won the right to be remembered with love and called with pride.
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.