When my partner came out of the war he didn’t have any breeches. That is an actual truth. Well, his wife, one of the best women that ever lived, reared in the lap of luxury, took her old woolen dress that she had worn during the war—and it had been a garment of sorrow and of consecration and of heroism—and cut it up and made a good pair of breeches. He started with that pair of breeches and with $5 in gold as his capital, and he scraped up boards from amid the ashes of his home, and built him a shanty of which love made a home and which courtesy made hospitable. And now I believe he has with him three pairs of breeches and several pairs at home. We have prospered down there.
I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. A funeral is not usually a cheerful object to me unless I could select the subject. I think I could, perhaps, without going a hundred miles from here, find the material for one or two cheerful funerals. Still, this funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor “one gallus” fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits and hit him at the other end about the knee—he didn’t believe in decollete clothes. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones.
Now we have improved on that. We have got the biggest marble-cutting establishment on earth within a hundred yards of that grave. We have got a half-dozen woolen mills right around it, and iron mines, and iron furnaces, and iron factories. We are coming to meet you. We are going to take a noble revenge, as my friend, Mr. Carnegie, said last night, by invading every inch of your territory with iron, as you invaded ours twenty-nine years ago.
A voice—I want to know if the tariff built up these industries down there?
Mr. Grady—The tariff? Well, to be perfectly frank with you, I think it helped some; but you can bet your bottom dollar that we are Democrats straight through from the soles of our feet to the top of our heads, and Mr. Cleveland will not have if he runs again, which I am inclined to think he ought to do, a stronger following.
Now, I want to say one word about the reception we had here. It has been a constant revelation of hospitality and kindness and brotherhood from the whole people of this city to myself and my friends. It has touched us beyond measure.
I was struck with one thing last night. Every speaker that rose expressed his confidence in the future and lasting glory of this Republic. There may be men, and there are, who insist on getting up fratricidal strife, and who infamously fan the embers of war that they may raise them again into a blaze. But just as certain as there is a God in the heavens, when those noisy insects of the hour have perished in the heat that gave them life, and their pestilent tongues have ceased, the great clock of this Republic will strike the slow-moving, tranquil hours, and the watchman from the street will cry, “All is well with the Republic; all is well.”
We bring to you, from hearts that yearn for your confidence and for your love, the message of fellowship from our homes. This message comes from consecrated ground. The fields in which I played were the battle-fields of this Republic, hallowed to you with the blood of your soldiers who died in victory, and doubly sacred to us with the blood of ours who died undaunted in defeat. All around my home are set the hills of Kennesaw, all around the mountains and hills down which the gray flag fluttered to defeat, and through which American soldiers from either side charged like demigods; and I do not think I could bring you a false message from those old hills and those sacred fields—witnesses twenty years ago in their red desolation of the deathless valor of American arms and the quenchless bravery of American hearts, and in their white peace and tranquillity to-day of the imperishable Union of the American States and the indestructible brotherhood of the American people.
It is likely that I will not again see Bostonians assembled together. I therefore want to take this occasion to thank you, and my excellent friends of last night and those friends who accompanied us this morning for all that you have done for us since we have been in your city, and to say that whenever any of you come South just speak your name, and remember that Boston or Massachusetts is the watchword, and we will meet you at the gates.
The monarch may forget the crown