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_From the “Kansas City Globe.”_
IN the death of Henry W. Grady the South has lost one of its foremost
and best men. He was pre-eminently the foremost man of the South, and to
the credit of the section it can be said that he had not attained to
such a position by services in the past, but by duty conceived and well
discharged in the present. He was not a creature of the war, but was
born of the events succeeding the war and which, in turn, he has helped
to shape for the good of the South, in a way that has represented a
sentiment which has induced immigration and the investment of capital,
so that, short as has been the span of his life of usefulness, it has
been long enough to see the realization of his greatest ambition and
hopes—the South redeemed from the despair of defeat and made a
prosperous part of a great nation and a factor in working out a glorious
future for a reunited people.
Intensely Southern in his sentiments, devotedly attached to his section
and as proud of it in poverty and defeat as in the day of its present
prosperity, to which he much contributed, Henry W. Grady comprehended
the situation as soon as man’s estate allowed him to begin the work of
his life, and he set about making a New South, in no sense, as he
claimed in his famous Boston speech, in disparagement of the Old South,
but because new ideas had taken root, because of new conditions; and the
new ideas he cultivated to a growth that opened a better sentiment
throughout the South, produced a better appreciation of Southern
sentiment in the North, and helped to harmonize the difference between
the sections that war sought to divide, but which failing still left “a
bloody chasm” to be spanned or filled up. That it is obliterated along
with the ramparts of fortresses and the earthworks of the war, is as
much due, or more, to Henry W. Grady than any man who has lived in the
South, a survivor of the war, or brought out of its sequences into
prominence.
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.
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