Henry W. Grady, the peerless orator and true patriot, has been called to join the silent majority. This sad intelligence reached Elberton last Monday morning, by private telegram, and there was a gloom cast over the community unequaled in the history of the town. Henry Grady was loved and admired all over the South, but nowhere more dearly than in this section.
It seems hard that this brilliant young statesman should have been cut off just before he had gained the goal, just prior to when he would have written his name among that galaxy of eminent men who have gone before and made the world better for having lived in it. If Grady had lived he would have carried to a happy ultimatum the purpose he had just commenced in solving the vexatious race problem, and in doing this he would have had a place with the names of Jefferson, Washington, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster.
Grady was a great man. He was not only an orator of Hill-like ability, but he was a statesman. His writings and speeches for years were well able and well panoplied to grapple with and treat the most intricate and complicated questions in a masterly manner.
His recent speech in Boston, at which time he contracted the cold that terminated in his premature death, was particularly and singularly forcible. The press and people, both North and South, with one accord pronounced it one of the ablest papers of the nineteenth century, and with this great work begun, and the great architect thereof dead, it is difficult to conjecture who will or can come to the front and finish the grand and noble undertaking.
Grady’s first and greatest love was Atlanta. He was like an inexhaustible gold mine to that town, and the Gate City has sustained an irreparable loss. But Atlanta’s confines were too contracted for a heart and brain like his. He loved Georgia, almost like he loved his mother, and for Georgia’s weal, he would have sacrificed his all.
Georgia’s loss, the South’s loss, cannot be estimated.
At his bier we bow our heads in profound sorrow, and were it so that we could, we would cull the whitest flower in the whole world and place it on the grave of this the truest, noblest Georgian of them all.