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_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.
Then came Grady’s death. It shocked the country that a man so gifted and
the only American capable of pronouncing an oration as faultless as the
philippics of Demosthenes, or as the sturdy, resistless orations of
Gladstone, could not live immortal as his prophetic sentences that still
illumine the brain and electrify the heart of an entire people.
Grady’s two speeches in the East, if he had never written or spoken
aught else, would be the Leuctra and Mantinea, immortal victories and
only daughters of an Epaminondas. If there survived no other children of
Henry Grady’s genius than these two, his renown would be as lasting as
the glory and greatness and peace of the Republic which he gave his life
to assure.
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