The Project Gutenberg eBook of Joel Chandler Harris' Life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches, by Joel Chandler Harris

Title: Joel Chandler Harris' Life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches

Editor: Joel Chandler Harris

Release Date: May 26, 2022 [eBook #68178]

Language: English

Produced by: David Edwards, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

ENGRAVED FROM PHOTOGRAPH BY C. W. MOTES.
H. W. Grady.

IT is within the bounds of entire accuracy to say that the death of no man ever created a deeper and more universal sorrow than that which responded to the announcement that Henry Woodfin Grady had paid his final debt of nature, and was gone to his last account. The sense of grief and regret attained the dignity of a national bereavement, and was at one and the same time both public and personal. The young and gifted Georgian had made a great impression upon his country and his time; blending an individuality, picturesque, strong and attractive, and an eloquence as rarely solid as it was rhetorically fine, into a character of the first order of eminence and brilliancy. In every section of the Union, the people felt that a noble nature and a splendid intellect had been subtracted from the nation’s stock of wisdom and virtue. This feeling was intensified the nearer it approached the region where he was best known and honored: but it reached the farthest limits of the land, and was expressed by all classes and parties with an homage equally ungrudging and sincere.

In Georgia, and throughout the Southern States, it rose to a lamentation. He was, indeed, the hope and expectancy of the young South, the one publicist of the New South, who, inheriting the spirit of the old, yet had realized the present, and looked into the future, with the eyes of a statesman and the heart of a patriot. His own future was fully assured. He had made his place; had won his spurs; and he possessed the qualities, not merely to hold them, but greatly to magnify their importance. That he 6should be cut down upon the threshold of a career, for whose magnificent development and broad usefulness all was prepared, seemed a cruel dispensation of Providence and aroused a heart-breaking sentiment far beyond the bounds compassed by Mr. Grady’s personality.

Of the details of his life, and of his life-work, others have spoken in the amplest terms. I shall, in this place, content myself with placing on the record my own remembrance and estimate of the man as he was known to me. Mr. Grady became a writer for the press when but little more than a boy, and during the darkest days of the Reconstruction period. There was in those days but a single political issue for the South. Our hand was in the lion’s mouth, and we could do nothing, hope for nothing, until we got it out. The young Georgian was ardent, impetuous, the son of a father slain in battle, the offspring of a section, the child of a province; yet he rose to the situation with uncommon faculties of courage and perception; caught the spirit of the struggle against reaction with perfect reach; and threw himself into the liberal and progressive movements of the time with the genius of a man born for both oratory and affairs. At first, his sphere of work was confined to the newspapers of the South. But, not unreasonably or unnaturally, he wished a wider field of duty, and went East, carrying letters in which he was commended in terms which might have seemed extravagant then, but which he more than vindicated. His final settlement in the capital of his native State, and in a position where he could speak directly and responsibly, gave him the opportunity he had sought to make a name and fame for himself, and an audience of his own. Here he carried the policy with which he had early identified himself to its finest conclusions; coming at once to the front as a champion of a free South and a united country, second to none in efficiency, equaled by none in eloquence.

He was eager and aspiring, and, in the heedlessness of youth, with its aggressive ambitions, may not have been at all times discriminating and considerate in the objects of 7his attacks; but he was generous to a fault, and, as he advanced upon the highway, he broadened with it and to it, and, if he had lived, would have realized the fullest measure of his own promise and the hopes of his friends. The scales of error, when error he felt he had committed, were fast falling from his eyes, and he was frank to own his changed, or changing, view. The vista of the way ahead was opening before him with its far perspective clear to his mental sight. He had just delivered an utterance of exceeding weight and value, winning universal applause, and was coming home to be welcomed by his people with open arms, when the Messenger of Death summoned him to his God. The tidings of the fatal termination of his disorder, so startling in their suddenness and unexpectedness, added to the last scene of all a feature of dramatic interest.

For my own part, I can truly say that I was from the first and always proud of him, hailed him as a young disciple who had surpassed his elders in learning and power, recognized in him a master voice and soul, followed his career with admiring interest, and recorded his triumphs with ever-increasing sympathy and appreciation. We had broken a lance or two between us; but there had been no lick below the belt, and no hurt which was other than skin-deep, and during considerably more than a year before his death a most cordial and unreserved correspondence had passed between us. The telegram which brought the fatal news was a grievous shock to me, for it told me that I had lost a good friend, and the cause of truth a great advocate. It is with a melancholy satisfaction that I indite these lines, thankful for the opportunity afforded me to do so by the kindness of his associates and family. Such spirits are not of a generation, but of an epoch; and it will be long before the South will find one to take the place made conspicuously vacant by his absence.

Louisville, February 9, 1890.

8

THE HOME OF GRADY’S BOYHOOD, ATHENS.

ORDINARILY, it is not a difficult matter to write a biographical sketch. Here are the dates, one in faded ink in an old Bible, the other glistening under the morning sun, or the evening stars, on the cold gravestone. Here is the business, the occupation, the profession, success or failure—a little scrap of paper here and there, and beyond and above everything, the fact of death; of death that, in a pitiful way, becomes as perfunctory as any other fact or event. Ordinarily, there is no difficulty in grouping these things, throwing in a word of eulogy here and there, and sympathizing in a formal way with the friends and relatives and the community in general.

But to give adequate shape to even the slightest sketch of the unique personality and the phenomenal career of Henry Woodfin Grady, who died, as it were, but yesterday, is well-nigh impossible; for here was a life that has no parallel in our history, productive as our institutions have been of individuality. A great many Americans have achieved fame in their chosen professions,—have won distinction and commanded the popular approval, but here is a career which is so unusual as to have no precedent. In recalling to mind the names of those who have been most conspicuously successful in touching the popular heart, one fact invariably presents itself—the fact of office. It is not, perhaps, an American fact peculiarly, but it seems to be so, since the proud and the humble, the great and the 10small, all seem willing to surrender to its influence. It is the natural order of things that an American who is ambitious—who is willing, as the phrase goes, to serve the people (and it is a pretty as well as a popular phrase)—should have an eye on some official position, more or less important, which he would be willing to accept even at a sacrifice if necessary. This is the American plan, and it has been so sanctified by history and custom that the modern reformers, who propose to apply a test of fitness to the office-seekers, are hooted at as Pharisees. After our long and promiscuous career of office-seeking and office-holding, a test of fitness seems to be a monarchical invention which has for its purpose the destruction of our republican institutions.

It is true that some of the purest and best men in our history have held office, and have sought it, and this fact gives additional emphasis to one feature of Henry Grady’s career. He never sought office, and he was prompt to refuse it whenever it was brought within his reach. On one occasion a tremendous effort was made to induce him to become a candidate for Congress in the Atlanta district. The most prominent people in the district urged him, his friends implored him, and a petition largely signed was presented to him. Never before in Georgia has a citizen been formally petitioned by so large a number of his fellow-citizens to accept so important an office. Mr. Grady regarded the petition with great curiosity. He turned it over in his mind and played with it in a certain boyish and impulsive way that belonged to everything he did and that was one of the most charming elements of his character. His response to the petition is worth giving here. He was, as he said, strongly tempted to improve a most flattering opportunity. He then goes on to read a lesson to the young men of the South that is still timely, though it was written in 1882. He says:

When I was eighteen years of age, I adopted journalism as my profession. After thirteen years of service, in which I have had various fortunes, I can say that I have never seen a day when I regretted my 11choice. On the contrary, I have seen the field of journalism so enlarged, its possibilities so widened, and its influence so extended, that I have come to believe earnestly that no man, no matter what his calling, his elevation, or his opportunity, can equal in dignity, honor and usefulness the journalist who comprehends his position, fairly measures his duties, and gives himself entirely and unselfishly to his work. But journalism is a jealous profession, and demands the fullest allegiance of those who seek its honors or emoluments. Least of all things can it be made the aid of the demagogue, or the handmaid of the politician. The man who uses his journal to subserve his political ambition, or writes with a sinister or personal purpose, soon loses his power, and had best abandon a profession he has betrayed. Within my memory there are frequent and striking examples of men who have sacrificed the one profession, only to be sacrificed in the other. History has not recorded the name of a single man who has been great enough to succeed in both. Therefore, devoted as I am to my profession, believing as I do that there is more of honor and usefulness for me along its way than in another path, and that my duty is clear and unmistakable, I am constrained to reaffirm in my own mind and to declare to you the resolution I made when I entered journalism, namely, that as long as I remain in its ranks I will never become a candidate for any political office, or draw a dollar from any public treasury. This rule I have never broken, and I hope I never shall. As a matter of course, every young man of health and spirit must have ambition, I think it has been the curse of the South that our young men have considered little else than political preferment worthy of an ambitious thought. There is a fascination about the applause of the hustings that is hard to withstand. Really, there is no career that brings so much of unhappiness and discontent—so much of subservience, sacrifice, and uncertainty as that of the politician. Never did the South offer so little to her young men in the direction of politics as she does at present. Never did she offer so much in other directions. As for me, my ambition is a simple one. I shall be satisfied with the labors of my life if, when those labors are over, my son, looking abroad upon a better and grander Georgia—a Georgia that has filled the destiny God intended her for—when her towns and cities are hives of industry, and her country-side the exhaustless fields from which their stores are drawn—when every stream dances on its way to the music of spindles, and every forest echoes back the roar of the passing train—when her valleys smile with abundant harvests, and from her hillsides come the tinkling of bells as her herds and flocks go forth from their folds—when more than two million people proclaim her perfect independence, and bless her with their love—I shall be more than content, I say, if my son, looking upon such scenes as these, can stand up and say:

12“My father bore a part in this work, and his name lives in the memory of this people.”

While I am forced, therefore, to decline to allow the use of my name as you request, I cannot dismiss your testimonial, unprecedented, I believe, in its character and compass, without renewing my thanks for the generous motives that inspired it. Life can bring me no sweeter satisfaction than comes from this expression of confidence and esteem from the people with whom I live, and among whom I expect to die. You have been pleased to commend the work I may have done for the old State we love so well. Rest assured that you have to-day repaid me amply for the past, and have strengthened me for whatever duty may lie ahead.

Brief as it is, this is a complete summary of Mr. Grady’s purpose so far as politics were concerned. It is the key-note of his career. He was ambitious—he was fired with that “noble discontent,” born of genius, that spurs men to action, but he lacked the selfishness that leads to office-seeking. It is not to be supposed, however, that he scorned politics. He had unbounded faith in the end and aim of certain principles of government, and he had unlimited confidence in the honesty and justice of the people and in the destiny of the American Union—in the future of the Republic.

What was the secret of his popularity? By what methods did he win the affections of people who never saw his face or heard his voice? His aversion to office was not generally known—indeed, men who regarded him in the light of rivalry, and who had access to publications neither friendly nor appreciative, had advertised to the contrary. By them it was hinted that he was continually seeking office and employing for that purpose all the secret arts of the demagogue. Yet, in the face of these sinister intimations, he died the best beloved and the most deeply lamented man that Georgia has ever produced, and, to crown it all, he died a private citizen, sacrificing his life in behalf of a purpose that was neither personal nor sectional, but grandly national in its aims.

In the last intimate conversation he had with the writer of this, Mr. Grady regretted that there were people in 13Georgia who misunderstood his motives and intentions. We were on the train going from Macon to Eatonton, where he was to speak.

“I am going to Eatonton solely because you seem to have your heart set on it,” he said. “There are people who will say that I am making a campaign in my own behalf, and you will hear it hinted that I am going about the State drumming up popularity for the purpose of running for some office.”

The idea seemed to oppress him, and though he never bore malice against a human being, he was keenly hurt at any interpretation of his motives that included selfishness or self-seeking among them. In this way, he was often deeply wounded by men who ought to have held up his hands.

When he died, those who had wronged him, perhaps unintentionally, by attributing to him a selfish ambition that he never had, were among the first to do justice to his motives. Their haste in this matter (there are two instances in my mind) has led me to believe that their instinct at the last was superior to their judgment. I have recently read again nearly all the political editorials contributed to the Constitution by Mr. Grady during the last half-dozen years. Taken together, they make a remarkable showing. They manifest an extraordinary growth, not in style or expression—for all the graces of composition were fully developed in Mr. Grady’s earliest writings—but in lofty aim, in the high and patriotic purpose that is to be found at its culmination in his Boston speech. I mention the Boston speech because it is the last serious effort he made. Reference might just as well have been made to the New England speech, or to the Elberton speech, or to the little speech he delivered at Eatonton, and which was never reported. In each and all of these there is to be found the qualities that are greater than literary nimbleness or rhetorical fluency—the qualities that kindle the fires of patriotism and revive and restore the love of country.

14In his Eatonton speech, Mr. Grady was particularly happy in his references to a restored Union and a common country, and his earnestness and his eloquence were as conscientious there as if he were speaking to the largest and most distinguished audience in the world, and as if his address were to be printed in all the newspapers of the land. I am dwelling on these things in order to show that there was nothing affected or perfunctory in Mr. Grady’s attitude. He had political enemies in the State—men who, at some turn in their career, had felt the touch and influence of his hand, or thought they did—and these men were always ready, through their small organs and mouthpieces, to belittle his efforts and to dash their stale small beer across the path of this prophet of the New South, who strove to impress his people with his own brightness and to lead them into the sunshine that warmed his own life and made it beautiful. Perhaps these things should not be mentioned in a sketch that can only be general in its nature; and yet they afford a key to Mr. Grady’s character; they supply the means of getting an intimate glimpse of his motives. That the thoughtless and ill-tempered criticisms of his contemporaries wounded him is beyond question. They troubled him greatly, and he used to talk about them to his co-workers with the utmost freedom. But they never made him malicious. He always had some excuse to offer for those who misinterpreted him, and no attack, however bitter, was ever made on his motives, that he could not find a reasonable excuse for in some genial and graceful way.

The great point about this man was that he never bore malice. His heart was too tender and his nature too generous. The small jealousies, and rivalries, and envies that appertain to life, and, indeed, are a definite part of it, never touched him in the slightest degree. He was conscious of the growth of his powers, and he watched their development with the curiosity and enthusiasm of a boy, but the egotism that is based on arrogance or self-esteem he had no knowledge of. The consciousness of the purity 15of his motives gave him strength and power in a direction where most other public men are weak. This same consciousness gave a breadth, an ardor, and an impulsiveness to his actions and utterances that seem to be wholly lacking in the lives of other public men who have won the applause of the public. The secret of this it would be difficult to define. When his companions in the office insisted that it was his duty to prepare at least an outline of his speeches so that the newspapers could have the benefit of such a basis, the suggestion fretted him. His speech at the annual banquet of the New England Society, which created such a tremendous sensation, was an impromptu effort from beginning to end. It was the creature of the occasion. Fortunately, a reporter of the New York Tribune was present, and he has preserved for us something of the flavor and finish of the words which the young Southerner uttered on his first introduction to a Northern audience. The tremendous impression that he made, however, has never been recorded. There was a faint echo of it in the newspapers, a buzz and a stir in the hotel lobbies, but all that was said was inadequate to explain why these sons of New England, accustomed as they were to eloquence of the rarer kind, as the volumes of their proceedings show, rose to their feet and shouted themselves hoarse over the simple and impromptu effort of this young Georgian.

Mr. Grady attended the New England banquet for the purpose of making a mere formal response to the toast of “The South,” but, as he said afterwards, there was something in the scene that was inspiring. Near him sat General Tecumseh Sherman, who marched through Georgia with fire and sword, and all around him were the fat and jocund sons of New England who had prospered by the results of the war while his own people had had the direst poverty for their portion. “When I found myself on my feet,” he said, describing the scene on his return, “every nerve in my body was strung as tight as a fiddle-string, and all tingling. I knew then that I had a message for that 16assemblage, and as soon as I opened my mouth it came rushing out.”

That speech, as we all know, was an achievement in its way. It stirred the whole country from one end to the other, and made Mr. Grady famous. Invitations to speak poured in upon him from all quarters, and he at last decided to deliver an address at Dallas, Texas. His friends advised him to prepare the speech in advance, especially as many of the newspapers of the country would be glad to have proofs of it to be used when it was delivered. He saw how essential this would be, but the preparation of a speech in cold blood (as he phrased it) was irksome to him, and failed to meet the approval of his methods, which were as responsive to the occasion as the report of the thunder-clap is to the lightning’s flash. He knew that he could depend on these methods in all emergencies and under all circumstances, and he felt that only by depending on them could he do himself justice before an audience. The one characteristic of all his speeches, as natural to his mind as it was surprising to the minds of others, was the ease and felicity with which he seized on suggestions born of the moment and growing out of his immediate surroundings. It might be some incident occurring to the audience, some failure in the programme, some remark of the speaker introducing him, or some unlooked-for event; but, whatever it was, he seized it and compelled it to do duty in pointing a beautiful moral, or he made it the basis of that swift and genial humor that was a feature not only of his speeches, but of his daily life.

He was prevailed on, however, to prepare his Dallas speech in advance. It was put in type in the Constitution office, carefully revised, and proof slips sent out to a number of newspapers. Mr. Grady’s journey from Atlanta to Dallas, which was undertaken in a special car, was in the nature of an ovation. He was met at every station by large crowds, and his appearance created an enthusiasm that is indescribable. No such tribute as this has ever before been paid, under any circumstances, to any private American 17citizen, and it is to be doubted whether even any public official, no matter how exalted his station, has ever been greeted with such hearty and spontaneous enthusiasm. His reception in Dallas was the culmination of the series of ovations through which he had passed. Some sort of programme had been arranged by a committee, but the crowds trampled on this, and the affair took the shape of an American hullaballoo, so to speak, and, as such, it was greatly enjoyed by Mr. Grady.

Meanwhile, the programme that had been arranged for the speech-making was fully carried out. The young editor completely captured the vast crowd that had assembled to hear him. This information had been promptly carried to the Constitution office by private telegrams, and everything was made ready for giving the speech to the public the next morning; but during the afternoon this telegram came:

“Suppress speech: It has been entirely changed. Notify other papers.”

At the last moment, his mind full of the suggestions of his surroundings, he felt that the prepared speech could not be depended on, and he threw it away. It was a great relief to him, he told me afterward, to be able to do this. Whatever in the prepared speech seemed to be timely he used, but he departed entirely from the line of it at every point, and the address that the Texans heard was mainly an impromptu one. It created immense enthusiasm, and confirmed the promise of the speech before the New England Society.

The speech before the University of Virginia was also prepared beforehand, but Mr. Grady made a plaything of the preparation before his audience. “I was never so thoroughly convinced of Mr. Grady’s power,” said the Hon. Guyton McLendon, of Thomasville, to the writer, “as when I heard him deliver this speech.” Mr. McLendon had accompanied him on his journey to Charlottesville. “We 18spent a day in Washington,” said Mr. McLendon, recalling the incidents of the trip. “The rest of the party rode around the capital looking at the sights, but Mr. Grady, myself, and one or two others remained in the car. While we were waiting there, Mr. Grady read me the printed slips of his speech, and I remember that it made a great impression on me. I thought it was good enough for any occasion, but Mr. Grady seemed to have his doubts about it. He examined it critically two or three times, and made some alterations. Finally he laid it away. When he did come to deliver the speech, I was perhaps the most astonished person you ever saw. I expected to hear again the speech that had been read to me in the Pullman coach, but I heard a vastly different and a vastly better one. He used the old speech only where it was most timely and most convenient. The incident of delivering the prize to a young student who had won it on a literary exercise of some sort, started Mr. Grady off in a new vein and on a new line, and after that he used the printed speech merely to fill out with here and there. It was wonderful how he could break away from it and come back to it, fitting the old with the new in a beautiful and harmonious mosaic. If anybody had told me that the human mind was capable of such a performance as this on the wing and in the air, so to speak, I shouldn’t have believed it. To me it was a wonderful manifestation of genius, and I knew then, for the first time, that there was no limit to Mr. Grady’s power and versatility as a speaker.”

In his speeches in the country towns of Georgia and before the farmers, Mr. Grady made no pretense of preparation. His private secretary, Mr. James R. Holliday, caught and wrote out the pregnant paragraphs that go to make up his Elberton speech, which was the skeleton and outline on which he based his speeches to the farmers. Each speech, as might be supposed, was a beautiful variation of this rural theme to which he was wedded, but the essential part of the Elberton speech was the bone and marrow of all. I think there is no passage in our modern 19literature equal in its effectiveness and pathos to his picture of a Southern farmer’s home. It was a matter on which his mind dwelt. There was that in his nature to which both sun and soil appealed. The rain falling on a fallow field, the sun shining on the bristling and waving corn, and the gentle winds of heaven blowing over all—he was never tired of talking of these, and his talk always took the shape of a series of picturesque descriptions. He appreciated their spiritual essence as well as their material meaning, and he surrendered himself entirely to all the wholesome suggestions that spring from the contemplation of rural scenes.

I suppose it is true that all men—except those who are brought in daily contact with the practical and prosy side of it—have a longing for a country life. Mr. Grady’s longing in that direction took the shape of a passion that was none the less serious and earnest because he knew it was altogether romantic. In the Spring of 1889, the matter engaged his attention to such an extent, that he commissioned a compositor in the Constitution office to purchase a suburban farm. He planned it all out beforehand, and knew just where the profits were to come in. His descriptions of his imaginary farm were inimitable, and the details, as he gave them out, were marked by the rare humor with which he treated the most serious matters. There was to be an old-fashioned spring in a clump of large oak-trees on the place, meadows of orchard grass and clover, through which mild-eyed Jerseys were to wander at will, and in front of the house there was to be a barley patch gloriously green, and a colt frolicking and capering in it. The farm was of course a dream, but it was a very beautiful one while it lasted, and he dwelt on it with an earnestness that was quite engaging to those who enjoyed his companionship. The farm was a dream, but he no doubt got more enjoyment and profit out of it than a great many prosy people get out of the farms that are real. Insubstantial as it was, Mr. Grady’s farm served to relieve the tension of a mind that was always busy with the larger 20affairs of this busy and stirring age, and many a time when he grew tired of the incessant demands made on his time and patience he would close the door of his room with a bang and instruct the office-boy to tell all callers that he had “gone to his farm.” The fat cows that grazed there lowed their welcome, the chickens cackled to see him come, and the colt capered nimbly in the green expanse of barley—children of his dreams all, but all grateful and restful to a busy mind.

II.

In this hurriedly written sketch, which is thrown together to meet the modern exigencies of publishing, the round, and full, and complete biography cannot be looked for. There is no time here for the selection and arrangement in an orderly way of the details of this busy and brilliant life. Under the circumstances, even the hand of affection can only touch it here and there so swiftly and so lightly that the random result must be inartistic and unsatisfactory. It was at such moments as these—moments of hurry and high-pressure—that Mr. Grady was at his best. His hand was never surer,—the machinery of his mind was never more responsive to the tremendous demands he made on it,—than when the huge press of the Constitution was waiting his orders; when the forms were waiting to be closed, when the compositors were fretting and fuming for copy, and when, perhaps, an express train was waiting ten minutes over its time to carry the Constitution to its subscribers. All his faculties were trained to meet emergencies; and he was never happier than when meeting them, whether in a political campaign, in conventions, in local issues, or in the newspaper business as correspondent or managing editor. Pressed by the emergency of his death, which to me was paralyzing, and by the necessity of haste, which, at this juncture, is confusing, these reminiscences have taken on a disjointed shape sadly at variance with the demands of literary art. Let me, therefore, somewhere in the middle, begin at the beginning.

21Henry Woodfin Grady was born in Athens, Georgia, on the 24th of April, 1850. As a little boy he was the leader of all the little boys of his acquaintance—full of that moral audacity that takes the lead in all innocent and healthy sports. An old gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, came into the Constitution editorial rooms shortly after Mr. Grady delivered the New England banquet speech, to say that he knew Henry when a boy. I listened with interest, but the memory of what he said is vague. I remember that his reminiscences had a touch of enthusiasm, going to show that the little boy was attractive enough to make a deep impression on his elders. He had, even when a child, all those qualities that draw attention and win approval. It is easy to believe that he was a somewhat boisterous boy. Even after he had a family of his own, and when he was supposed (as the phrase is) to have settled down, he still remained a boy to all intents and purposes. His vitality was inexhaustible, and his flow of animal spirits unceasing. In all athletic sports and out-door exercises he excelled while at school and college, and it is probable that his record as a boxer, wrestler, sprinter, and an all-around athlete is more voluminous than his record for scholarship. To the very last, his enthusiasm for these sports was, to his intimate friends, one of the most interesting characteristics of this many-sided man.

One of his characteristics as a boy, and it was a characteristic that clung to him through all his life, was his love and sympathy for the poor and lowly, for the destitute and the forlorn. This was one of the problems of life that he could never understand,—why, in the economy of Providence, some human beings should be rich and happy, and others poor and friendless. When a very little child he began to try to solve the problem in his own way. It was a small way, indeed, but if all who are fortunately situated should make the same effort charity would cause the whole world to smile, and Heaven could not possibly withhold the rich promise of its blessings. From his earliest childhood, Mr. Grady had a fondness for the negro 22race. He was fond of the negroes because they were dependent, his heart went out to them because he understood and appreciated their position. When he was two years old, he had a little negro boy named Isaac to wait on him. He always called this negro “Brother Isaac,” and he would cry bitterly, if any one told him that Isaac was not his brother. As he grew older his interest in the negroes and his fondness for them increased. Until he was eight or nine years old he always called his mother “Dear mother,” and when the weather was very cold, he had a habit of waking in the night and saying: “Dear mother, do you think the servants have enough cover? It’s so cold, and I want them to be warm.” His first thought was always for the destitute and the lowly—for those who were dependent on him or on others. At home he always shared his lunch with the negro children, and after the slaves were freed, and were in such a destitute condition, scarcely a week passed that some forlorn-looking negro boy did not bring his mother a note something like this: “Dear Mother: Please give this child something to eat. He looks so hungry. H. W. G.” It need not be said that no one bearing credentials signed by this thoughtful and unselfish boy was ever turned away hungry from the Grady door. It may be said, too, that his love and sympathy for the negroes was fully appreciated by that race. His mother says that she never had a servant during all his life that was not devoted to him, and never knew one to be angry or impatient with him. He could never bear to see any one angry or unhappy about him. As a child he sought to heal the wounds of the sorrowing, and to the last, though he was worried by the vast responsibilities he had taken on his shoulders and disturbed by the thoughtless demands made on his time and patience, he suffered more from the sorrows of others than from any troubles of his own. When he went to school, he carried the same qualities of sympathy and unselfishness that had made him charming as a child. If, among his school-mates, there was to be found a poor or a delicate child, he took that 23child under his especial care, and no one was allowed to trouble it in any way.

Shortly after he graduated at the State University, an event occurred that probably decided Mr. Grady’s future career. In an accidental way he went on one of the annual excursions of the Georgia Press Association as the correspondent of the Constitution. His letters describing the incidents of the trip were written over the signature of “King Hans.”

They were full of that racy humor that has since become identified with a large part of Mr. Grady’s journalistic work. They had a flavor of audacity about them, and that sparkling suggestiveness that goes first by one name and then another, but is chiefly known as individuality. The letters created a sensation among the editors. There was not much that was original or interesting in Georgia journalism in that day and time. The State was in the hands of the carpet-baggers, and the newspapers reflected in a very large degree the gloom and the hopelessness of that direful period. The editors abused the Republicans in their editorial columns day after day, and made no effort to enlarge their news service, or to increase the scope of their duties or their influence. Journalism in Georgia, in short, was in a rut, and there it was content to jog.

Though the “King Hans” letters were the production of a boy, their humor, their aptness, their illuminating power (so to say), their light touch, and their suggestiveness, showed that a new star had arisen. They created a lively diversion among the gloomy-minded editors for a while, and then the procession moved sadly forward in the old ruts. But the brief, fleeting, and humorous experience that Mr. Grady had as the casual correspondent of the Constitution decided him. Perhaps this was his bent after all, and that what might be called a happy accident was merely a fortunate incident that fate had arranged, for to this beautiful and buoyant nature fate seemed to be always kind. Into his short life it crowded its best and dearest gifts. All manner of happiness was his—the happiness 24of loving and of being beloved—the happiness of doing good in directions that only the Recording Angel could follow—and before he died Fame came and laid a wreath of flowers at his feet. Fate or circumstance carried him into journalism. His “King Hans” letters had attracted attention to him, and it seemed natural that he should follow this humorous experiment into a more serious field.

He went to Rome not long afterwards, and became editor of the Rome Courier. The Courier was the oldest paper in the city, and therefore the most substantial. It was, in fact, a fine piece of property. But the town was a growing town, and the Courier had rivals, the Rome Daily, if my memory serves me, and the Rome Commercial. Just how long Mr. Grady edited the Courier, I have no record of; but one fine morning, he thought he discovered a “ring” of some sort in the village. I do not know whether it was a political or a financial ring. We have had so many of these rings in one shape or another that I will not trust my memory to describe it; but it was a ring, and probably one of the first that dared to engage in business. Mr. Grady wrote a fine editorial denouncing it, but when the article was submitted to the proprietor, he made some objection. He probably thought that some of his patrons would take offense at the strong language Mr. Grady had used. After some conversation on the subject, the proprietor of the Courier flatly objected to the appearance of the editorial in his paper. Mr. Grady was about eighteen years old then, with views and a little money of his own. In the course of a few hours he had bought out the two opposing papers, consolidated them, and his editorial attack on the ring appeared the next morning in the Rome Daily Commercial. It happened on the same morning that the two papers, the Courier and the Daily Commercial, both appeared with the name of Henry W. Grady as editor. The ring, or whatever it was, was smashed. Nobody heard anything more of it, and the Commercial was greeted by its esteemed contemporaries as 25a most welcome addition to Georgia journalism. It was bright and lively, and gave Rome a new vision of herself.

It was left to the Commercial to discover that Rome was a city set on the hills, and that she ought to have an advertising torch in her hands. The Commercial, however, was only an experiment. It was run, as Mr. Grady told me long afterwards, as an amateur casual. He had money to spend on it, and he gave it a long string to go on. Occasionally he would fill it up with his bright fancies, and then he would neglect it for days at a time, and it would then be edited by the foreman. It was about this time that I met Mr. Grady. We had had some correspondence. He was appreciative, and whatever struck his fancy he had a quick response for. Some foolish paragraph of mine had appealed to his sense of humor, and he pursued the matter with a sympathetic letter that made a lasting impression. The result of that letter was that I went to Rome, pulled him from his flying ponies, and had a most enjoyable visit. From Rome we went to Lookout Mountain, and it is needless to say that he was the life of the party. He was its body, its spirit, and its essence. We found, in our journey, a dissipated person who could play on the zither. Just how important that person became, those who remember Mr. Grady’s pranks can imagine. The man with the zither took the shape of a minstrel, and in that guise he went with us, always prepared to make music, which he had often to do in response to Mr. Grady’s demands.

Rome, however, soon ceased to be large enough for the young editor. Atlanta seemed to offer the widest field, and he came here, and entered into partnership with Colonel Robert A. Alston and Alex St. Clair-Abrams. It was a queer partnership, but there was much that was congenial about it. Colonel Alston was a typical South Carolinian, and Abrams was a Creole. It would be difficult to get together three more impulsive and enterprising partners. Little attention was paid to the business office. The principal idea was to print the best newspaper in the South, and for a time this scheme was carried out in a magnificent 26way that could not last. Mr. Grady never bothered himself about the finances, and the other editors were not familiar with the details of business. The paper they published attracted more attention from newspaper men than it did from the public, and it was finally compelled to suspend. Its good will—and it had more good will than capital—was sold to the Constitution, which had been managed in a more conservative style. It is an interesting fact, however, that Mr. Grady’s experiments in the Herald, which were failures, were successful when tried on the Constitution, whose staff he joined when Captain Evan P. Howell secured a controlling interest. And yet Mr. Grady’s development as a newspaper man was not as rapid as might be supposed. He was employed by the Constitution as a reporter, and his work was intermittent.

One fact was fully developed by Mr. Grady’s early work on the Constitution,—namely, that he was not fitted for the routine work of a reporter. One day he would fill several columns of the paper with his bright things, and then for several days he would stand around in the sunshine talking to his friends, and entertaining them with his racy sayings. I have seen it stated in various shapes in books and magazines that the art of conversation is dead. If it was dead before Mr. Grady was born, it was left to him to resurrect it. Charming as his pen was, it could bear no reasonable comparison with his tongue. I am not alluding here to his eloquence, but to his ordinary conversation. When he had the incentive of sympathetic friends and surroundings, he was the most fascinating talker I have ever heard. General Toombs had large gifts in that direction, but he bore no comparison in any respect to Mr. Grady, whose mind was responsive to all suggestions and to all subjects. The men who have made large reputations as talkers have had the habit of selecting their own subjects and treating them dogmatically. We read of Coleridge buttonholing an acquaintance and talking him to death on the street, and of Carlyle compelling himself to be heard by sheer vociferousness. Mr. Grady 27could have made the monologue as interesting as he did his orations, but this was not his way. What he did was to take up whatever commonplace subject was suggested, and so charge it with his nimble wit and brilliant imagination as to give it a new importance.

It was natural, under the circumstances, that his home in Atlanta should be the center of the social life of the city. He kept open house, and, aided by his lovely wife and two beautiful children, dispensed the most charming hospitality. There was nothing more delightful than his home-life. Whatever air or attitude he had to assume in business, at home he was a rollicking and romping boy. He put aside all dignity there, and his most distinguished guest was never distinguished enough to put on the airs of formality that are commonly supposed to be a part of social life. His home was a typical one,—the center of his affections and the fountain of all his joys—and he managed to make all his friends feel what a sacred place it was. It was the headquarters of all that is best and brightest in the social and intellectual life of Atlanta, and many of the most distinguished men of the country have enjoyed the dispensation of his hospitality, which was simple and homelike, having about it something of the flavor and ripeness of the old Southern life.

In writing of the life and career of a man as busy in so many directions as Mr. Grady, one finds it difficult to pursue the ordinary methods of biographical writing. One finds it necessary, in order to give a clear idea of his methods, which were his own in all respects, to be continually harking back to some earlier period of his career. I have alluded to his distaste for the routine of reportorial work. The daily grind—the treadmill of trivial affairs—was not attractive to him; but when there was a sensation in the air—when something of unusual importance was happening or about to happen—he was in his element. His energy at such times was phenomenal. He had the faculty of grasping all the details of an event, and the imagination to group them properly so as to give them their full force 28and effect. The result of this is shown very clearly in his telegrams to the New York Herald and the Constitution from Florida during the disputed count going on there in 1876 and the early part of 1877. Mr. Tilden selected Senator Joseph E. Brown, among other prominent Democrats, to proceed to Florida, and look after the Democratic case there. Mr. Grady went as the special correspondent of the New York Herald and the Atlanta Constitution, and though he had for his competitors some of the most famous special writers of the country, he easily led them all in the brilliancy of his style, in the character of his work, and in his knack of grouping together gossip and fact. He was always proud of his work there; he was on his mettle, as the saying is, and I think there is no question that, from a journalist’s point of view, his letters and telegrams, covering the history of what is known politically as the Florida fraud, have no equal in the newspaper literature of the day. There is no phase of that important case that his reports do not cover, and they represent a vast amount of rapid and accurate work—work in which the individuality of the man is as prominent as his accuracy and impartiality. One of the results of Mr. Grady’s visit to Florida, and his association with the prominent politicians gathered there, was to develop a confidence in his own powers and resources that was exceedingly valuable to him when he came afterwards to the management of the leading daily paper in the South. He discovered that the men who had been successful in business and in politics had no advantage over him in any of the mental qualities and attributes that appertain to success, and this discovery gave purpose and determination to his ambition.

Another fruitful fact in his career, which he used to dwell on with great pleasure, was his association while in Florida with Senator Brown—an association that amounted to intimacy. Mr. Grady always had a very great admiration for Senator Brown, but in Florida he had the opportunity of working side by side with the Senator and of studying the methods by which he managed 29men and brought them within the circle of his powerful influence. Mr. Grady often said that it was one of the most instructive lessons of his life to observe the influence which Senator Brown, feeble as he was in body, exerted on men who were almost total strangers. The contest between the politicians for the electoral vote of Florida was in the nature of a still hunt, where prudence, judgment, skill, and large knowledge of human nature were absolutely essential. In such a contest as this, Senator Brown was absolutely master of the situation, and Mr. Grady took great delight in studying his methods, and in describing them afterwards.

Busy as Mr. Grady was in Florida with the politicians and with his newspaper correspondence, he nevertheless found time to make an exhaustive study of the material resources of the State, and the result of this appeared in the columns of the Constitution at a later date in the shape of a series of letters that attracted unusual attention throughout the country. This subject, the material resources of the South, and the development of the section, was always a favorite one with Mr. Grady. He touched it freely from every side and point of view, and made a feature of it in his newspaper work. To his mind there was something more practical in this direction than in the heat and fury of partisan politics. Whatever would aid the South in a material way, develop her resources and add to her capital, population, and industries, found in him not only a ready, but an enthusiastic and a tireless champion. He took great interest in politics, too, and often made his genius for the management of men and issues felt in the affairs of the State; but the routine of politics—the discussion that goes on, like Tennyson’s brook, forever and forever—were of far less importance in his mind than the practical development of the South. This seemed to be the burthen of his speeches, as it was of all his later writings. He never tired of this subject, and he discussed it with a brilliancy, a fervor, a versatility, and a fluency marvelous enough to have made the reputation of 30half a dozen men. Out of his contemplation of it grew the lofty and patriotic purpose which drew attention to his wonderful eloquence, and made him famous throughout the country—the purpose to draw the two sections together in closer bonds of union, fraternity, harmony, and good-will. The real strength and symmetry of his career can only be properly appreciated by those who take into consideration the unselfishness with which he devoted himself to this patriotic purpose. Instinctively the country seemed to understand something of this, and it was this instinctive understanding that caused him to be regarded with affectionate interest and appreciation from one end of the country to the other by people of all parties, classes, and interests. It was this instinctive understanding that made him at the close of his brief career one of the most conspicuous Americans of modern times, and threw the whole country into mourning at his death.

III.

When in 1880 Mr. Grady bought a fourth interest in the Constitution, he gave up, for the most part, all outside newspaper work, and proceeded to devote his time and attention to his duties as managing editor, for which he was peculiarly well fitted. His methods were entirely his own. He borrowed from no one. Every movement he made in the field of journalism was stamped with the seal of his genius. He followed no precedent. He provided for every emergency as it arose, and some of his strokes of enterprise were as bold as they were startling. He had a rapid faculty of organization. This was shown on one occasion when he determined to print official reports of the returns of the congressional election in the seventh Georgia district. Great interest was felt in the result all over the State. An independent candidate was running against the Democratic nominee, and the campaign was one of the liveliest ever had in Georgia. Yet it is a district that lies in the mountains and winds around and over them. Ordinarily, it was sometimes a fortnight and frequently a 31month before the waiting newspapers and the public knew the official returns. Mr. Grady arranged for couriers with relays of horses at all the remote precincts, and the majority of them are remote from the lines of communication, and his orders to these were to spare neither horse-flesh nor money in getting the returns to the telegraph stations. At important points, he had placed members of the Constitution’s editorial and reportorial staff, who were to give the night couriers the assistance and directions which their interest and training would suggest. It was a tough piece of work, but all the details and plans had been so perfectly arranged that there was no miscarriage anywhere. One of the couriers rode forty miles over the mountains, fording rushing streams and galloping wildly over the rough roads. It was a rough job, but he had been selected by Mr. Grady especially for this piece of work; he was a tough man and he had tough horses under him, and he reached the telegraph station on time. This sort of thing was going on all over the district, and the next morning the whole State had the official returns. Other feats of modern newspaper enterprise have been more costly and as successful, but there is none that I can recall to mind showing a more comprehensive grasp of the situation or betraying a more daring spirit. It was a feat that appealed to the imagination, and therefore on the Napoleonic order.

And yet it is a singular fact that all his early journalistic ventures were in the nature of failures. The Rome Commercial, which he edited before he had attained his majority, was a bright paper, but not financially successful. Mr. Grady did some remarkably bold and brilliant work on the Atlanta Daily Herald, but it was expensive work, too, and the Herald died for lack of funds. Mr. Marion J. Verdery, in his admirable memorial of Mr. Grady, prepared for the Southern Society of New York (which I have taken the liberty of embodying in this volume) alludes to these failures of Mr. Grady, and a great many of his admirers have been mystified by them. I think the explanation is very simple. Mr. Grady was a 32new and a surprising element in the field of journalism, and his methods were beyond the comprehension of those who had grown gray watching the dull and commonplace politicians wielding their heavy pens as editors, and getting the news accidentally, if at all. There are a great many people in this world of ours—let us say the average people, in order to be mathematically exact—who have to be educated up to an appreciation of what is bright and beautiful, or bold and interesting. Some of Mr. Grady’s methods were new even in American journalism, and it is no wonder that his dashing experiments with the Daily Herald were failures, or that commonplace people regarded them as crude and reckless manifestations of a purpose and a desire to create a sensation. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that when the Daily Herald was running its special locomotives up and down the railroads of the State, the field of journalism in Atlanta was exceedingly narrow and provincial. The town had been rescued from the village shape, but neither its population nor its progress warranted the experiments on the Herald. They were mistakes of time and place, but they were not mistakes of conception and execution. They helped to educate and enlighten the public, and to give that dull, clumsy, and slow-moving body a taste of the spirit and purpose of modern journalism. The public liked the taste that it got, and smacked its lips over it and remembered it, and was always ready after that to respond promptly to the efforts of Mr. Grady to give it the work of his head and hands.

Bright and buoyant as he was, his early failures in journalism dazed and mortified him, but they did not leave him depressed. If he had his hours of depression and gloom he reserved them for himself. Even when all his resources had been exhausted, he was the same genial, witty, and appreciative companion, the center of attraction wherever he went. The year 1876 was the turning-point in his career in more ways than one. In the fall of that year, Captain Evan P. Howell bought a controlling interest in the Constitution. The day after the purchase was 33made, Captain Howell met Mr. Grady, who was on his way to the passenger station.

“I was just hunting for you,” said Captain Howell. “I want to have a talk with you.”

“Well, you’ll have to talk mighty fast,” said Mr. Grady. “Atlanta’s either too big for me, or I am too big for Atlanta.”

It turned out that the young editor, discomfited in Atlanta, but not discouraged, was on his way to Augusta to take charge of the Constitutionalist of that city. Captain Howell offered him a position at once, which was promptly accepted. There was no higgling or bargaining; the two men were intimate friends; there was something congenial in their humor, in their temperaments, and in a certain fine audacity in political affairs that made the two men invincible in Georgia politics from the day they began working together. Before the train that was to bear Mr. Grady to Augusta had steamed out of the station, he was on his way to the Constitution office to enter on his duties, and then and there practically began between the two men a partnership as intimate in its relations of both friendship and business as it was important on its bearings on the wonderful success of the Constitution and on the local history and politics of Georgia. It was an ideal partnership in many respects, and covered almost every movement, with one exception, that the two friends made. That exception was the prohibition campaign in Atlanta, that attracted such widespread attention throughout the country. Mr. Grady represented the prohibitionists and Captain Howell the anti-prohibitionists, and it was one of the most vigorous and amusing campaigns the town has ever witnessed. Each partner was the chief speaker of the side he represented, and neither lost an opportunity to tell a good-humored joke at the other’s expense. Thus, while the campaign was an earnest one in every respect, and even embittered to some small extent by the thoughtless utterances of those who seem to believe that moral issues can best be settled by a display of fanaticism, the tension was 34greatly relieved by the wit, the humor, the good nature and the good sense which the two leaders injected into the canvas.

The sentimental side of Mr. Grady’s character was more largely and more practically developed than that of any other person I have ever seen. In the great majority of cases sentiment develops into a sentimentality that is sometimes maudlin, sometimes officious, and frequently offensive. In most people it develops as the weakest and least attractive side of their character. It was the stronghold of Mr. Grady’s nature. It enveloped his whole career, to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, in sweetness and light, and made his life a real dispensation in behalf of the lives of others. Wherever he found suffering and sorrow, no matter how humble—wherever he found misery, no matter how coarse and degraded, he struck hands with them then and there, and wrapped them about and strengthened them with his abundant sympathy. Until he could give them relief in some shape, he became their partner, and a very active and energetic partner he was. I have often thought that his words of courage and cheer, always given with a light and humorous touch to hide his own feelings, was worth more than the rich man’s grudging gift. It was this side of Mr. Grady’s nature that caused him to turn with such readiness to the festivities of Christmas. He was a great admirer of Charles Dickens, especially of that writer’s Christmas literature. It was an ideal season with Mr. Grady, and it presented itself to his mind less as a holiday time than as an opportunity to make others happy—the rich as well as the poor. He had a theory that the rich who have become poor by accident or misfortune suffer the stings of poverty more keenly than the poor who have always been poor, for the reason that they are not qualified to fight against conditions that are at once strange and crushing. Several Christmases ago, I had the pleasure of witnessing a little episode in which he illustrated his theory to his own satisfaction as well as to mine.

On that particular Christmas eve, there was living in 35Atlanta an old gentleman who had at one time been one of the leading citizens of the town. He had in fact been a powerful influence in the politics of the State, but the war swept away his possessions, and along with them all the conditions and surroundings that had enabled him to maintain himself comfortably. His misfortunes came on him when he was too old to begin the struggle with life anew with any reasonable hope of success. He gave way to a disposition that had been only convivial in his better days when he had hope and pride to sustain him, and he sank lower until he had nearly reached the gutter.

I joined Mr. Grady as he left the office, and we walked slowly down the street enjoying the kaleidoscopic view of the ever-shifting, ever hurrying crowd as it swept along the pavements. In all that restless and hastening throng there seemed to be but one man bent on no message of enjoyment or pleasure, and he was old and seedy-looking. He was gazing about him in an absent-minded way. The weather was not cold, but a disagreeable drizzle was falling.

“Yonder is the Judge,” said Mr. Grady, pointing to the seedy-looking old man. “Let’s go and see what he is going to have for Christmas.”

I found out long afterwards that the old man had long been a pensioner on Mr. Grady’s bounty, but there was nothing to suggest this in the way in which the young editor approached the Judge. His manner was the very perfection of cordiality and consideration, though there was just a touch of gentle humor in his bright eyes.

“It isn’t too early to wish you a merry Christmas, I hope,” said Mr. Grady, shaking hands with the old man.

“No, no,” replied the Judge, straightening himself up with dignity; “not at all. The same to you, my boy.”

“Well,” remarked Mr. Grady lightly, “you ought to be fixing up for it. I’m not as old as you are, and I’ve got lots of stirring around and shopping to do if I have any fun at home.”

The eyes of the Judge sought the ground. “No. I was—ah—just considering.” Then he looked up into the laughing but sympathetic eyes of the boyish young fellow, 36and his dignity sensibly relaxed. “I was only—ah—Grady, let me see you a moment.”

The two walked to the edge of the pavement, and talked together some little time. I did not overhear the conversation, but learned afterwards that the Judge told Mr. Grady that he had no provisions at home, and no money to buy them with, and asked for a small loan.

“I’ll do better than that,” said Mr. Grady. “I’ll go with you and buy them myself. Come with us,” he remarked to me with a quizzical smile. “The Judge here has found a family in distress, and we are going to send them something substantial for Christmas.”

We went to a grocery store near at hand, and I saw, as we entered, that the Judge had not only recovered his native dignity, but had added a little to suit the occasion. I observed that his bearing was even haughty. Mr. Grady had observed it, too, and the humor of the situation so delighted him that he could hardly control the laughter in his voice.

“Now, Judge,” said Mr. Grady, as we approached the counter, “we must be discreet as well as liberal. We must get what you think this suffering family most needs. You call off the articles, the clerk here will check them off, and I will have them sent to the house.”

The Judge leaned against the counter with a careless dignity quite inimitable, and glanced at the well-filled shelves.

“Well,” said he, thrumming on a paper-box, and smacking his lips thoughtfully, “we will put down first a bottle of chow-chow pickles.”

“Why, of course,” exclaimed Mr. Grady, his face radiant with mirth; “it is the very thing. What next?”

“Let me see,” said the Judge, closing his eyes reflectively—“two tumblers of strawberry jelly, three pounds of mince-meat, and two pounds of dates, if you have real good ones, and—yes—two cans of deviled ham.”

Every article the Judge ordered was something he had been used to in his happier days. The whole episode was 37like a scene from one of Dickens’s novels, and I have never seen Mr. Grady more delighted. He was delighted with the humor of it, and appreciated in his own quaint and charming way and to the fullest extent the pathos of it. He dwelt on it then and afterwards, and often said that he envied the broken-down old man the enjoyment of the luxuries of which he had so long been deprived.

On a memorable Christmas day not many years after, Mr. Grady stirred Atlanta to its very depths by his eloquent pen, and brought the whole community to the heights of charity and unselfishness on which he always stood. He wrought the most unique manifestation of prompt and thoughtful benevolence that is to be found recorded in modern times. The day before Christmas was bitter cold, and the night fell still colder, giving promise of the coldest weather that had been felt in Georgia for many years. The thermometer fell to zero, and it was difficult for comfortably clad people to keep warm even by the fires that plenty had provided, and it was certain that there would be terrible suffering among the poor of the city. The situation was one that appealed in the strongest manner to Mr. Grady’s sympathies. It appealed, no doubt, to the sympathies of all charitably-disposed people; but the shame of modern charity is its lack of activity. People are horrified when starving people are found near their doors, when a poor woman wanders about the streets until death comes to her relief; they seem to forget that it is the duty of charity to act as well as to give. Mr. Grady was a man of action. He did not wait for the organization of a relief committee, and the meeting of prominent citizens to devise ways and means for dispensing alms. He was his own committee. His plans were instantly formed and promptly carried out. The organization was complete the moment he determined that the poor of Atlanta should not suffer for lack of food, clothing, or fuel. He sent his reporters out into the highways and byways, and into every nook and corner of the city. He took one assignment for himself, and went about through the cold from house to 38house. He had a consultation with the Mayor at midnight, and cases of actual suffering were relieved then and there. The next morning, which was Sunday, the columns of the Constitution teemed with the results of the investigation which Mr. Grady and his reporters had made. A stirring appeal was made in the editorial columns for aid for the poor—such an appeal as only Mr. Grady could make. The plan of relief was carefully made out. The Constitution was prepared to take charge of whatever the charitably disposed might feel inclined to send to its office—and whatever was sent should be sent early.

The effect of this appeal was astonishing—magical, in fact. It seemed impossible to believe that any human agency could bring about such a result. By eight o’clock on Christmas morning—the day being Sunday—the street in front of the Constitution office was jammed with wagons, drays, and vehicles of all kinds, and the office itself was transformed into a vast depot of supplies. The merchants and business men had opened their stores as well as their hearts, and the coal and wood dealers had given the keys of their establishments into the gentle hands of charity. Men who were not in business subscribed money, and this rose into a considerable sum. When Mr. Grady arrived on the scene, he gave a shout of delight, and cut up antics as joyous as those of a schoolboy. Then he proceeded to business. He had everything in his head, and he organized his relief trains and put them in motion more rapidly than any general ever did. By noon, there was not a man, woman, or child, white or black, in the city of Atlanta that lacked any of the necessaries of life, and to such an extent had the hearts of the people been stirred that a large reserve of stores was left over after everybody had been supplied. It was the happiest Christmas day the poor of Atlanta ever saw, and the happiest person of all was Henry Grady.

It is appropriate to his enjoyment of Christmas to give here a beautiful editorial he wrote on Christmas day a year before he was buried. It is a little prose poem that 39attracted attention all over the country. Mr. Grady called it

No man or woman now living will see again such a Christmas day as the one which closed yesterday, when the dying sun piled the western skies with gold and purple.

A winter day it was, shot to the core with sunshine. It was enchanting to walk abroad in its prodigal beauty, to breathe its elixir, to reach out the hands and plunge them open-fingered through its pulsing waves of warmth and freshness. It was June and November welded and fused into a perfect glory that held the sunshine and snow beneath tender and splendid skies. To have winnowed such a day from the teeming winter was to have found an odorous peach on a bough whipped in the storms of winter. One caught the musk of yellow grain, the flavor of ripening nuts, the fragrance of strawberries, the exquisite odor of violets, the aroma of all seasons in the wonderful day. The hum of bees underrode the whistling wings of wild geese flying southward. The fires slept in drowsing grates, while the people, marveling outdoors, watched the soft winds woo the roses and the lilies.

Truly it was a day of days. Amid its riotous luxury surely life was worth living to hold up the head and breathe it in as thirsting men drink water; to put every sense on its gracious excellence; to throw the hands wide apart and hug whole armfuls of the day close to the heart, till the heart itself is enraptured and illumined. God’s benediction came down with the day, slow dropping from the skies. God’s smile was its light, and all through and through its supernal beauty and stillness, unspoken but appealing to every heart and sanctifying every soul, was His invocation and promise, “Peace on earth, good will to men.”

IV.

Mr. Grady took great interest in children and young people. It pleased him beyond measure to be able to contribute to their happiness. He knew all the boys in the Constitution office, and there is quite a little army of them employed there in one way and another; knew all about their conditions, their hopes and their aspirations, and knew their histories. He had favorites among them, but his heart went out to all. He interested himself in them in a thousand little ways that no one else would have thought of. He was never too busy to concern himself with their affairs. A year or two before he died he organized a dinner 40for the newsboys and carriers. It was at first intended that the dinner should be given by the Constitution, but some of the prominent people heard of it, and insisted in making contributions. Then it was decided to accept contributions from all who might desire to send anything, and the result of it was a dinner of magnificent proportions. The tables were presided over by prominent society ladies, and the occasion was a very happy one in all respects.

This is only one of a thousand instances in which Mr. Grady interested himself in behalf of young people. Wherever he could find boys who were struggling to make a living, with the expectation of making something of themselves; wherever he could find boys who were giving their earnings to widowed mothers—and he found hundreds of them—he went to their aid as promptly and as effectually as he carried out all his schemes, whether great or small. It was his delight to give pleasure to all the children that he knew, and even those he didn’t know. He had the spirit and the manner of a boy, when not engrossed in work, and he enjoyed life with the zest and enthusiasm of a lad of twelve. He was in his element when a circus was in town, and it was a familiar and an entertaining sight to see him heading a procession of children—sometimes fifty in line—going to the big tents to see the animals and witness the antics of the clowns. At such times, he considered himself on a frolic, and laid his dignity on the shelf. His interest in the young, however, took a more serious shape, as I have said. When Mr. Clark Howell, the son of Captain Evan Howell, attained his majority, Mr. Grady wrote him a letter, which I give here as one of the keys to the character of this many-sided man. Apart from this, it is worth putting in print for the wholesome advice it contains. The young man to whom it was written has succeeded Mr. Grady as managing editor of the Constitution. The letter is as follows:

My Dear Clark:—I suppose that just about the time I write this to you—a little after midnight—you are twenty-one years old. If you 41were born a little later than this hour it is your mother’s fault (or your father’s), and I am not to blame for it. I assume, therefore, that this is your birthday, and I send you a small remembrance. I send you a pen (that you may wear as a cravat-pin) for several reasons. In the first place, I have no money, my dear boy, with which to buy you something new. In the next place, it is the symbol of the profession to which we both belong, in which each has done some good work, and will, God being willing, do much more. Take the pen, wear it, and let it stand as a sign of the affection I have for you.

Somehow or other (as the present is a right neat one I have the right to bore you a little) I look upon you as my own boy. My son will be just about your age when you are about mine, and he will enter the paper when you are about where I am. I have got to looking at you as a sort of prefiguring of what my son may be, and of looking over you, and rejoicing in your success, as I shall want you to feel toward him. Let me write to you what I would be willing for you to write to him.

Never Gamble. Of all the vices that enthrall men, this is the worst, the strongest, and the most insidious. Outside of the morality of it, it is the poorest investment, the poorest business, and the poorest fun. No man is safe who plays at all. It is easiest never to play. I never knew a man, a gentleman and man of business, who did not regret the time and money he had wasted in it. A man who plays poker is unfit for every other business on earth.

Never Drink. I love liquor and I love the fellowship involved in drinking. My safety has been that I never drink at all. It is much easier not to drink at all than to drink a little. If I had to attribute what I have done in life to any one thing, I should attribute it to the fact that I am a teetotaler. As sure as you are born, it is the pleasantest, the easiest, and the safest way.

Marry Early. There is nothing that steadies a young fellow like marrying a good girl and raising a family. By marrying young your children grow up when they are a pleasure to you. You feel the responsibility of life, the sweetness of life, and you avoid bad habits.

If you never drink, never gamble, and marry early, there is no limit to the useful and distinguished life you may live. You will be the pride of your father’s heart, and the joy of your mother’s.

I don’t know that there is any happiness on earth worth having outside of the happiness of knowing that you have done your duty and that you have tried to do good. You try to build up,—there are always plenty others who will do all the tearing down that is necessary. You try to live in the sunshine,—men who stay in the shade always get mildewed.

I will not tell you how much I think of you or how proud I am of 42you. We will let that develop gradually. There is only one thing I am a little disappointed in. You don’t seem to care quite enough about base-ball and other sports. Don’t make the mistake of standing aloof from these things and trying to get old too soon. Don’t underrate out-door athletic sports as an element of American civilization and American journalism. I am afraid you inherit this disposition from your father, who has never been quite right on this subject, but who is getting better, and will soon be all right, I think.

Well, I will quit. May God bless you, my boy, and keep you happy and wholesome at heart, and in health. If He does this, we’ll try and do the rest.

Your friend, H. W. Grady.

Mr. Grady’s own boyishness led him to sympathize with everything that appertains to boyhood. His love for his own children led him to take an interest in other children. He wanted to see them enjoy themselves in a boisterous, hearty, health-giving way. The sports that men forget or forego possessed a freshness for him that he never tried to conceal. His remarks, in the letter just quoted, in regard to out-door sports, are thoroughly characteristic. In all contests of muscle, strength, endurance and skill he took a continual and an absorbing interest. At school he excelled in all athletic sports and out-door games. He had a gymnasium of his own, which was thrown open to his school-mates, and there he used to practice for hours at a time. His tastes in this direction led a great many people, all his friends, to shake their heads a little, especially as he was not greatly distinguished for scholarship, either at school or college. They wondered, too, how, after neglecting the text-books, he could stand so near the head of his classes. He did not neglect his books. During the short time he devoted to them each day, his prodigious memory and his wonderful powers of assimilation enabled him to master their contents as thoroughly as boys that had spent half the night in study. Even his family were astonished at his standing in school, knowing how little time he devoted to his text-books. He found time, however, in spite of his devotion to out-door sports and athletic exercises, to read every book in Athens, and in those days every family in town had a library of more or less value.

43He had a large library of his own, and, by exchanging his books with other boys and borrowing, he managed to get at the pith and marrow of all the English literature to be found in the university town. Not content with this, he became, during one of his vacation periods, a clerk in the only bookstore in Athens. The only compensation that he asked was the privilege of reading when there were no customers to be waited on. This was during his eleventh year, and by the time he was twelve he was by far the best-read boy that Athens had ever known. This habit of reading he kept up to the day of his death. He read all the new books as they came out, and nothing pleased him better than to discuss them with some congenial friend. He had no need to re-read his old favorites—the books he loved as boy and man—for these he could remember almost chapter by chapter. He read with amazing rapidity; it might be said that he literally absorbed whatever interested him, and his sympathies were so wide and his taste so catholic that it was a poor writer indeed in whom he could not find something to commend. He was fond of light literature, but the average modern novel made no impression on him. He enjoyed it to some extent, and was amazed as well as amused at the immense amount of labor expended on the trivial affairs of life by the writers who call themselves realists. He was somewhat interested in Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” mainly, I suspect, because it so cleverly hits off the character of the modern female newspaper correspondent in the person of Miss Henrietta Stackpole. Yet there was much in the book that interested him—the dreariness of parts of it was relieved by Mrs. Touchett. “Dear old Mrs. Touchett!” he used to say. “Such immense cleverness as hers does credit to Mr. James. She refuses to associate with any of the other characters in the book. I should like to meet her, and shake hands with her, and talk the whole matter over.”

When a school-boy, and while devouring all the stories that fell in his way, young Grady was found one day reading 44Blackstone. His brother asked him if he thought of studying law. “No,” was the reply, “but I think everyone ought to read Blackstone. Besides, the book interests me.” With the light and the humorous he always mixed the solids. He was fond of history, and was intensely interested in all the social questions of the day. He set great store by the new literary development that has been going on in the South since the war, and sought to promote it by every means in his power, through his newspaper and by his personal influence. He looked forward to the time when the immense literary field, as yet untouched in the South, would be as thoroughly worked and developed as that of New England has been; and he thought that this development might reasonably be expected to follow, if it did not accompany, the progress of the South in other directions. This idea was much in his mind, and in the daily conversations with the members of his editorial staff, he recurred to it time and again. One view that he took of it was entirely practical, as, indeed, most of his views were. He thought that the literature of the South ought to be developed, not merely in the interest of belles-lettres, but in the interest of American history. He regarded it as in some sort a weapon of defense, and he used to refer in terms of the warmest admiration to the oftentimes unconscious, but terribly certain and effective manner in which New England had fortified herself by means of the literary genius of her sons and daughters. He perceived, too, that all the talk about a distinctive Southern literature, which has been in vogue among the contributors of the Lady’s Books and annuals, was silly in the extreme. He desired it to be provincial in a large way, for, in this country, provinciality is only another name for the patriotism that has taken root in the rural regions, but his dearest wish was that it should be purely and truly American in its aim and tendency. It was for this reason that he was ready to welcome any effort of a Southern writer that showed a spark of promise. For such he was always ready with words of praise.

45He was fond, as I have said, of Dickens, but his favorite novel, above all others, was Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” His own daring imagination fitted somewhat into the colossal methods of Hugo, and his sympathies enabled him to see in the character of Jean Valjean a type of the pathetic struggle for life and justice that is going on around us every day. Mr. Grady read between the lines and saw beneath the surface, and he was profoundly impressed with the strong and vital purpose of Hugo’s book. Its almost ferocious protest against injustice, and its indignant arraignment of the inhumanity of society, stirred him deeply. Not only the character of Jean Valjean, but the whole book appealed to his sense of the picturesque and artistic. The large lines on which the book is cast, the stupendous nature of the problem it presents, the philanthropy, the tenderness—all these moved him as no other work of fiction ever did. Mr. Grady’s pen was too busy to concern itself with matters merely literary. He rarely undertook to write what might be termed a literary essay; the affairs of life—the demands of the hour—the pressure of events—precluded this; but all through his lectures and occasional speeches (that were never reported), there are allusions to Jean Valjean, and to Victor Hugo. I have before me the rough notes of some of his lectures, and in these appear more than once picturesque allusions to Hugo’s hero struggling against fate and circumstance.

V.

The home-life of Mr. Grady was peculiarly happy. He was blessed, in the first place, with a good mother, and he never grew away from her influence in the smallest particular. When his father was killed in the war, his mother devoted herself the more assiduously to the training of her children. She molded the mind and character of her brilliant son, and started him forth on a career that has no parallel in our history. To that mother his heart always turned most tenderly. She had made his boyhood bright 46and happy, and he was never tired of bringing up recollections of those wonderful days. On one occasion, the Christmas before he died, he visited his mother at the old home in Athens. He returned brimming over with happiness. To his associates in the Constitution office he told the story of his visit, and what he said has been recorded by Mrs. Maude Andrews Ohl, a member of the editorial staff.

“Well do I remember,” says Mrs. Ohl, “how he spent his last year’s holiday season, and the little story he told me of it as I sat in his office one morning after New Year’s.

“He had visited his mother in Athens Christmas week, and he said: ‘I don’t think I ever felt happier than when I reached the little home of my boyhood. I got there at night. She had saved supper for me and she had remembered all the things I liked. She toasted me some cheese over the fire. Why, I hadn’t tasted anything like it since I put off my round jackets. And then she had some home-made candy, she knew I used to love and bless her heart! I just felt sixteen again as we sat and talked, and she told me how she prayed for me and thought of me always, and what a brightness I had been to her life, and how she heard me coming home in every boy that whistled along the street. When I went to bed she came and tucked the covers all around me in the dear old way that none but a mother’s hands know, and I felt so happy and so peaceful and so full of tender love and tender memories that I cried happy, grateful tears until I went to sleep.’

“When he finished his eyes were full of tears and so were mine. He brushed his hands across his brow swiftly and said, laughingly: ‘Why, what are you crying about? What do you know about all this sort of feeling!’

“He never seemed brighter than on that day. He had received an ovation of loving admiration from the friends of his boyhood at his old home, and these honors from the hearts that loved him as a friend were dearer than all others. It was for these friends, these countrymen of 47his own, that his honors were won and his life was sacrificed.”

From the home-life of his boyhood he stepped into the fuller and richer home-life that followed his marriage. He married the sweetheart of his early youth, Miss Julia King, of Athens, and she remained his sweetheart to the last. The first pseudonym that he used in his contributions to the Constitution, “King Hans,” was a fanciful union of Miss King’s name with his, and during his service in Florida, long after he was married, he signed his telegrams “Jule.” In the office not a day passed that he did not have something to say of his wife and children. They were never out of his thoughts, no matter what business occupied his mind. In his speeches there are constant allusions to his son, and in his conversation the gentle-eyed maiden, his daughter, was always tenderly figuring. His home-life was in all respects an ideal one; ideal in its surroundings, in its influences, and in its purposes. I think that the very fact of his own happiness gave him a certain restlessness in behalf of the happiness of others. His writings, his speeches, his lectures—his whole life, in fact—teem with references to home-happiness and home-content. Over and over again he recurs to these things—always with the same earnestness, always with the same enthusiasm. He never meets a man on the street, but he wonders if he has a happy home—if he is contented—if he has children that he loves. To him home was a shrine to be worshiped at—a temple to be happy in, no matter how humble, or how near to the brink of poverty.

One of his most successful lectures, and the one that he thought the most of, was entitled “A Patchwork Palace: The story of a Home.” The Patchwork Palace still exists in Atlanta, and the man who built it is living in it to-day. Mr. Grady never wrote out the lecture, and all that can be found of it is a few rough and faded notes scratched on little sheets of paper. On one occasion, however, he condensed the opening of his lecture for the purpose of making a newspaper sketch of the whole. It is unfinished, but the 48following has something of the flavor of the lecture. He called the builder of the Palace Mr. Mortimer Pitts, though that is not his name:

Mr. Mortimer Pitts was a rag-picker. After a patient study of the responsibility that the statement carries, I do not hesitate to say that he was the poorest man that ever existed. He lived literally from hand to mouth. His breakfast was a crust; his dinner a question; his supper a regret. His earthly wealth, beyond the rags that covered him, was—a cow that I believe gave both butter-milk and sweet-milk—a dog that gave neither—and a hand-cart in which he wheeled his wares about. His wife had a wash-tub that she held in her own title, a wash-board similarly possessed, and two chairs that came to her as a dowry.

In opposition to this poverty, my poor hero had—first, a name (Mortimer Pitts, Esq.) which his parents, whose noses were in the air when they christened him, had saddled upon him aspiringly, but which followed him through life, his condition being put in contrast with its rich syllables, as a sort of standing sarcasm. Second, a multitude of tow-headed children with shallow-blue eyes. The rag-picker never looked above the tow-heads of his brats, nor beyond the faded blue eyes of his wife. His world was very small. The cricket that chirped beneath the hearthstone of the hovel in which he might chance to live, and the sunshine that crept through the cracks, filled it with music and light. Trouble only strengthened the bonds of love and sympathy that held the little brood together, and whenever the Wolf showed his gaunt form at the door, the white faces, and the blue eyes, and the tow-heads only huddled the closer to each other, until, in very shame, the intruder would take himself off.

Mr. Pitts had no home. With the restlessness of an Arab he flitted from one part of the city to another. He was famous for frightening the early market-maids by pushing his white round face, usually set in a circle of smaller white round faces, through the windows of long-deserted hovels. Wherever there was a miserable shell of a house that whistled when the wind blew, and wept when the rain fell, there you might be sure of finding Mr. Pitts at one time or another. I do not care to state how many times my hero, with an uncertain step and a pitifully wandering look—his fertile wife, in remote or imminent process of fruitage—his wan and sedate brood of young ones—his cow, a thoroughly conscientious creature, who passed her scanty diet to milk to the woeful neglect of tissue—and his dog, too honest for any foolish pride, ambling along in an unpretending, bench-legged sort of way,—I do not care to state, I say, how many times this pale and melancholy procession passed through the streets, seeking for a shelter in which it might hide its wretchedness and ward off the storms.

49During these periods of transition, Mr. Pitts was wonderfully low-spirited. “Even a bird has its nest; and the poorest animal has some sort of a hole in the ground, or a roost where it can go when it is a-weary,” he said to me once, when I caught him fluttering aimlessly out of a house which, under the influence of a storm, had spit out its western wall, and dropped its upper jaw dangerously near to the back of the cow. And from that time forth, I fancied I noticed my poor friend’s face growing whiter, and the blue in his eye deepening, and his lips becoming more tremulous and uncertain. The shuffling figure, begirt with the rag-picker’s bells, and dragging the wobbling cart, gradually bended forward, and the look of childish content was gone from his brow, and a great dark wrinkle had knotted itself there.

And now let me tell you about the starting of the Palace.

One day in the springtime, when the uprising sap ran through every fibre of the forest, and made the trees as drunk as lords—when the birds were full-throated, and the air was woven thick with their songs of love and praise—when the brooks kissed their uttermost banks, and the earth gave birth to flowers, and all nature was elastic and alert, and thrilled to the core with the ecstasy of the sun’s new courtship—a divine passion fell like a spark into Mr. Mortimer Pitts’s heart. How it ever broke through the hideous crust of poverty that cased the man about, I do not know, nor shall we ever know ought but that God put it there in his own gentle way. But there it was. It dropped into the cold, dead heart like a spark—and there it flared and trembled, and grew into a blaze, and swept through his soul, and fed upon its bitterness until the scales fell off and the eyes flashed and sparkled, and the old man was illumined with a splendid glow like that which hurries youth to its love, or a soldier to the charge. You would not have believed he was the same man. You would have laughed had you been told that the old fellow, sweltering in the dust, harnessed like a dog to a cart, and plying his pick into the garbage heaps like a man worn down to the stupidity of a machine, was burning and bursting with a great ambition—that a passion as pure and as strong as ever kindled blue blood, or steeled gentle nerves was tugging at his heart-strings. And yet, so it was. The rag-picker was filled with a consuming fire—and as he worked, and toiled, and starved, his soul sobbed, and laughed, and cursed, and prayed.

Mr. Pitts wanted a home. A man named Napoleon once wanted universal empire. Mr. Pitts was vastly the more daring dreamer of the two.

I do not think he had ever had a home. Possibly, away back beyond the years a dim, sweet memory of a hearthstone and a gable roof with the rain pattering on it, and a cupboard and a clock, and a deep, still well, came to him like an echo or a dream. Be this as it may, our 50hero, crushed into the very mud by poverty—upon knees and hands beneath his burden—fighting like a beast for his daily food—shut out inexorably from all suggestions of home—embittered by starvation—with his faculties chained down apparently to the dreary problem of to-day—nevertheless did lift his eyes into the gray future, and set his soul upon a home.

This is a mere fragment—a bare synopsis of the opening of what was one of the most eloquent and pathetic lectures ever delivered from the platform. It was a beautiful idyll of home—an appeal, a eulogy—a glimpse, as it were, of the passionate devotion with which he regarded his own home. Here is another fragment of the lecture that follows closely after the foregoing:

After a month’s struggle, Mr. Pitts purchased the ground on which his home was to be built. It was an indescribable hillside, bordering on the precipitous. A friend of mine remarked that “it was such an aggravating piece of profanity that the owner gave Mr. Pitts five dollars to accept the land and the deed to it.” This report I feel bound to correct. Mr. Pitts purchased the land. He gave three dollars for it. The deed having been properly recorded, Mr. Pitts went to work. He borrowed a shovel, and, perching himself against his hillside, began loosening the dirt in front of him, and spilling it out between his legs, reminding me, as I passed daily, of a giant dirt-dauber. At length (and not very long either, for his remorseless desire made his arms fly like a madman’s) he succeeded in scooping an apparently flat place out of the hillside and was ready to lay the foundation of his house.

There was a lapse of a month, and I thought that my hero’s soul had failed him—that the fire, with so little of hope to feed upon, had faded and left his heart full of ashes. But at last there was a pile of dirty second-hand lumber placed on the ground. I learned on inquiry that it was the remains of a small house of ignoble nature which had been left standing in a vacant lot, and which had been given him by the owner. Shortly afterwards there came some dry-goods boxes; then three or four old sills; then a window-frame; then the wreck of another little house; and then the planks of an abandoned show-bill board. Finally the house began to grow. The sills were put together by Mr. Pitts and his wife. A rafter shot up toward the sky and stood there, like a lone sentinel, for some days, and then another appeared, and then another, and then the fourth. Then Mr. Pitts, with an agility born of desperation, swarmed up one of them, and began to lay the cross-pieces. God must have commissioned an angel especially to watch over the poor man and save his bones, for nothing short of a miracle 51could have kept him from falling while engaged in the perilous work. The frame once up, he took the odds and ends of planks and began to fit them. The house grew like a mosaic. No two planks were alike in size, shape, or color. Here was a piece of a dry-goods box, with its rich yellow color, and a mercantile legend still painted on it, supplemented by a dozen pieces of plank; and there was an old door nailed up bodily and fringed around with bits of board picked up at random. It was a rare piece of patchwork, in which none of the pieces were related to or even acquainted with each other. A nose, an eye, an ear, a mouth, a chin picked up at random from the ugliest people of a neighborhood, and put together in a face, would not have been odder than was this house. The window was ornamented with panes of three different sizes, and some were left without any glass at all, as Mr. Pitts afterwards remarked, “to see through.” The chimney was a piece of old pipe that startled you by protruding unexpectedly through the wall, and looked as if it were a wound. The entire absence of smoke at the outer end of this chimney led to a suspicion, justified by the facts, that there was no stove at the other end. The roof, which Mrs. Pitts, with a recklessness beyond the annals, mounted herself and attended to, was partially shingled and partially planked, this diversity being in the nature of a plan, as Mr. Pitts confidentially remarked, “to try which style was the best.”

Such a pathetic travesty on house-building was never before seen. It started a smile or a tear from every passer-by, as it reared its homely head there, so patched, uncouth, and poor. And yet the sun of Austerlitz never brought so much happiness to the heart of Napoleon as came to Mr. Pitts, as he crept into this hovel, and, having a blanket before the doorless door, dropped on his knees and thanked God that at last he had found a home.

The house grew in a slow and tedious way. It ripened with the seasons. It budded in the restless and rosy spring; unfolded and developed in the long summer; took shape and fullness in the brown autumn; and stood ready for the snows and frost when winter had come. It represented a year of heroism, desperation, and high resolve. It was the sum total of an ambition that, planted in the breast of a king, would have shaken the world.

To say that Mr. Pitts enjoyed it would be to speak but a little of the truth. I have a suspicion that the older children do not appreciate it as they should. They have a way, when they see a stranger examining their home with curious and inquiring eyes, of dodging away from the door shamefacedly, and of reappearing cautiously at the window. But Mr. Pitts is proud of it. There is no foolishness about him. He sits on his front piazza, which, I regret to say, is simply a plank resting on two barrels, and smokes his pipe with the serenity of a king; and 52when a stroller eyes his queer little home curiously, he puts on the air that the Egyptian gentleman (now deceased) who built the pyramids might have worn while exhibiting that stupendous work. I have watched him hours at a time enjoying his house. I have seen him walk around it slowly, tapping it critically with his knife, as if to ascertain its state of ripeness, or pressing its corners solemnly as if testing its muscular development.

Here ends this fragment—a delicious bit of description that only seems to be exaggerated because the hovel was seen through the eyes of a poet—of a poet who loved all his fellow men from the greatest to the smallest, and who was as much interested in the home-making of Mr. Pitts as he was in the making of Governors and Senators, a business in which he afterwards became an adept. From the fragments of one of his lectures, the title of which I am unable to give, I have pieced together another story as characteristic of Mr. Grady as the Patchwork Palace. It is curious to see how the idea of home and of home-happiness runs through it all:

One of the happiest men that I ever knew—one whose serenity was unassailable, whose cheerfulness was constant, and from whose heart a perennial spring of sympathy and love bubbled up—was a man against whom all the powers of misfortune were centered. He belonged to the tailors—those cross-legged candidates for consumption. He was miserably poor. Fly as fast as it could through the endless pieces of broadcloth, his hand could not always win crusts for his children. But he walked on and on; his thin white fingers faltered bravely through their tasks as the hours slipped away, and his serene white face bended forward over the tedious cloth into which, stitch after stitch, he was working his life—and, with once in a while a wistful look at the gleaming sunshine and the floating clouds, he breathed heavily and painfully of the poisoned air of his work-room, from which a score of stronger lungs had sucked all the oxygen. And when, at night, he would go home, and find that there were just crusts enough for the little ones to eat, the capricious old fellow would dream that he was not hungry; and when pressed to eat of the scanty store by his sad and patient wife, would with an air of smartness pretend a sacred lie—that he had dined with a friend—and then, with a heart that swelled almost to bursting, turn away to hide his glistening eyes. Hungry? Of course he was, time and again. As weak as his body was, as faltering as was the little fountain that sent the life-blood from his heart—as 53meagre as were his necessities, I doubt if there was a time in all the long years when he was not hungry.

Did you ever think of how many people have died out of this world through starvation. Thousands! Not recorded in the books as having died of starvation,—ah, no? Sometimes it is a thin and watery sort of apoplexy—sometimes it is dyspepsia, and often consumption. These terms read better. But there are thousands of them, sensitive, shy gentlemen—too proud to beg and too honest to steal—too straightforward to scheme or maneuver—too refined to fill the public with their griefs—too heroic to whine—that lock their sorrows up in their own hearts, and go on starving in silence, weakening day after day from the lack of proper food—the blood running slower and slower through their veins—their pulse faltering as they pass through the various stages of inanition, until at last, worn out, apathetic, exhausted, they are struck by some casual illness, and lose their hold upon life as easily and as naturally as the autumn leaf, juiceless, withered and dry, parts from the bough to which it has clung, and floats down the vast silence of the forest.

But my tailor was cheerful. Nothing could disturb his serenity. His thin white face was always lit with a smile, and his eyes shone with a peace that passed my understanding. Hour after hour he would sing an asthmatic little song that came in wheezes from his starved lungs—a song that was pitiful and cracked, but that came from his heart so freighted with love and praise that it found the ears of Him who softens all distress and sweetens all harmonies. I wondered where all this happiness came from. How gushed this abundant stream from this broken reed—how sprung this luxuriant flower of peace from the scant soil of poverty? From these hard conditions, how came this ever-fresh felicity?

After he had been turned out of his home, the tailor was taken sick. His little song gave way to a hectic cough. His place at the work-room was vacant, and a scanty bed in wretched lodgings held his frail and fevered frame. The thin fingers clutched the cover uneasily, as if they were restless of being idle while the little ones were crying for bread. The tired man tossed to and fro, racked by pain,—but still his face was full of content, and no word of bitterness escaped him. And the little song, though the poor lungs could not carry it to the lips, and the trembling lips could not syllable its music, still lived in his heart and shone through his happy eyes. “I will be happy soon,” he said in a faltering way; “I will be better soon—strong enough to go to work like a man again, for Bessie and the babies.” And he did get better—better until his face had worn so thin that you could count his heart-beats by the flush of blood that came and died in his cheeks—better until his face had sharpened and his smiles had worn their deep lines 54about his mouth—better until the poor fingers lay helpless at his side, and his eyes had lost their brightness. And one day, as his wife sat by his side, and the sun streamed in the windows, and the air was full of the fragrance of spring—he turned his face toward her and said: “I am better now, my dear.” And, noting a rapturous smile playing about his mouth, and a strange light kindling in his eyes, she bended her head forward to lay her wifely kiss upon his face. Ah! a last kiss, good wife, for thy husband! Thy kiss caught his soul as it fluttered from his pale lips, and the flickering pulse had died in his patient wrist, and the little song had faded from his heart and gone to swell a divine chorus,—and at last, after years of waiting, the old man was well!

There was nothing strained or artificial in the sentiment that led him to dwell so constantly on the theme of home and home happiness. The extracts I have given are merely the rough lecture notes which he wrote down in order to confirm and congeal his ideas. On the platform, while following the current of these notes, he injected into them the quality of his rare and inimitable humor, the contrast serving to give greater strength and coherence to the pathos that underlay it all. I do not know that I have dwelt with sufficient emphasis on his humor. He could be witty enough on occasion, but the sting of it seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth. The quality of his humor was not greatly different from that of Charles Lamb. It was gentle and perennial—a perpetual wonder and delight to his friends—irrepressible and unbounded—as antic and as tricksy as that of a boy, as genial and as sweet as the smile of a beautiful woman. Mr. Grady depended less on anecdote than any of our great talkers and speakers, though the anecdote, apt, pat, and pointed, was always ready at the proper moment. He depended rather on the originality of his own point of view—on the results of his own individuality. The charm of his personal presence was indescribable. In every crowd and on every occasion he was a marked man. Quite independently of his own intentions, he made his presence and his influence felt. What he said, no matter how light and frivolous, no matter how trivial, never failed to attract attention. He warmed the hearts of the old and fired the minds of the young. He managed, in 55some way, to impart something of the charm of his personality to his written words, so that he carried light, and hope, and courage to many hearts, and when he passed away, people who had never seen him fell to weeping when they heard of his untimely death.

VI.

There are many features and incidents in Mr. Grady’s life that cannot be properly treated in this hurriedly written and altogether inadequate sketch. His versatility was such that it would be difficult, even in a deliberately written biography, to deal with its manifestations and results as they deserve to be dealt with. At the North, the cry is, who shall take his place as a peacemaker? At the South, who shall take his place as a leader, as an orator, and as a peacemaker? In Atlanta, who shall take his place as all of these, and as a builder-up of our interests, our enterprises, and our industries! Who is to make for us the happy and timely suggestion? Who is to speak the right word at the right time! The loss the country has sustained in Mr. Grady’s death can only be measurably estimated when we examine one by one the manifold relations he bore to the people.

I have spoken of the power of organization that he possessed. There is hardly a public enterprise in Georgia or in Atlanta—begun and completed since 1880—that does not bear witness to his ability, his energy, and his unselfishness. His busy brain and prompt hand were behind the great cotton exposition held in Atlanta in 1881. Late in the spring of 1887, one of the editorial writers of the Constitution remarked that the next fair held in Atlanta should be called the Piedmont Exposition. “That shall be its name,” said Mr. Grady, “and it will be held this fall.” That was the origin of the Piedmont Exposition. Within a month the exposition company had been organized, the land bought, and work on the grounds begun. It seemed to be a hopeless undertaking—there was so much to be done, and so little time to do it in. But Mr, Grady 56was equal to the emergency. He so infused the town with his own energy and enthusiasm that every citizen came to regard the exposition as a personal matter, and the Constitution hammered away at it with characteristic iteration. There was not a detail of the great show from beginning to end that was not of Mr. Grady’s suggestion. When it seemed to him that he was taking too prominent a part in the management, he would send for other members of the fair committee, pour his suggestions into their ears, and thus evade the notoriety of introducing them himself and prevent the possible friction that might be caused if he made himself too prominent. He understood human nature perfectly, and knew how to manage men.

The exposition was organized and the grounds made ready in an incredibly short time, and the fair was the most successful in every respect that has ever been held in the South. Its attractions, which were all suggested by Mr. Grady, appealed either to the interest or the curiosity of the people, and the result was something wonderful. It is to be very much doubted whether any one in this country, in time of peace, has seen an assemblage of such vast and overwhelming proportions as that which gathered in Atlanta on the principal day of the fair. Two years later, the Piedmont Exposition was reorganized, and Mr. Grady once more had practical charge of all the details. The result was an exhibition quite as attractive as the first, to which the people responded as promptly as before. The Exposition Company cleared something over $20,000, a result unprecedented in the history of Southern fairs.

In the interval of the two fairs, Mr. Grady organized the Piedmont Chautauqua at a little station on the Georgia Pacific road, twenty miles from Atlanta. Beautiful grounds were laid out and commodious buildings put up. In all this work Mr. Grady took the most profound interest. The intellectual and educational features of such an institution appealed strongly to his tastes and sympathies, and to that active missionary spirit which impelled him to be continually on the alert in behalf of humanity. He expended a 57good deal of energy on the Chautauqua and on the programme of exercises, but the people did not respond heartily, and the session was not a financial success. And yet there never was a Chautauqua assembly that had a richer and a more popular programme of exercises. The conception was a success intellectually, and it will finally grow into a success in other directions. Mr. Grady, with his usual unselfishness, insisted on bearing the expenses of the lecturers and others, though it crippled him financially to do so. He desired to protect the capitalists who went into the enterprise on his account, and, as is usual in such cases, the capitalists were perfectly willing to be protected. Mr. Grady was of the opinion that his experience with the Chautauqua business gave him a deeper and a richer knowledge of human nature than he had ever had before.

One morning Mr. Grady saw in a New York newspaper that a gentleman from Texas was in that city making a somewhat unsuccessful effort to raise funds for a Confederate veterans’ home. The comments of the newspaper were not wholly unfriendly, but something in their tone stirred Mr. Grady’s blood. “I will show them,” he said, “what can be done in Georgia,” and with that he turned to his stenographer and dictated a double-leaded editorial that stirred the State from one end to the other. He followed it up the next day, and immediately subscriptions began to flow in. He never suffered interest in the project to flag until sufficient funds for a comfortable home for the Confederate veterans had been raised.

Previously, he had organized a movement for putting up a building for the Young Men’s Christian Association, and that building now stands a monument to his earnestness and unselfishness. Years ago, shortly after he came to Atlanta, he took hold of the Young Men’s Library, which was in a languishing condition, and put it on its feet. It was hard work, for he was comparatively unknown then. Among other things, he organized a lecture course for the benefit of the library, and he brought some distinguished lecturers to Atlanta—among others the late 58S. S. Cox. Mr. Cox telegraphed from New York that he would come to Atlanta, and also the subject of the lecture, so that it could be properly advertised. The telegram said that the title of the lecture was “Just Human,” and large posters, bearing that title, were placed on the bill-boards and distributed around town. As Mr. Grady said, “the town broke into a profuse perspiration of placards bearing the strange device, while wrinkles gathered on the brow of the public intellect and knotted themselves hopelessly as it pondered over what might be the elucidation of such a strangely-named subject. At last,” Mr. Grady goes on to say, “the lecturer came, and a pleasant little gentleman he was, who beguiled the walk to the hotel with the airiest of jokes and the brightest of comment. At length, when he had registered his name in the untutored chirography of the great, he took me to one side, and asked in an undertone what those placards meant.”

“That,” I replied, looking at him in astonishment, “is the subject of your lecture.”

“‘My lecture!’ he shrieked, ‘whose lecture? What lecture? My subject! Whose subject? Why, sir,’ said he, trying to control himself, ‘my subject is ‘Irish Humor,’ while this is ‘Just Human,’ and he put on his spectacles and glared into space as if he were determined to wring from that source some solution of this cruel joke.”

By an error of transmission, “Irish Humor” had become “Just Human.” Mr. Grady does not relate the sequel, but what followed was as characteristic of him as anything in his unique career.

“Well,” said he, turning to Mr. Cox, his bright eyes full of laughter, “you stick to your subject, and I’ll take this ready-made one; you lecture on ‘Irish Humor’ and I’ll lecture on ‘Just Human.’”

And he did. He took the telegraphic error for a subject, and delivered in Atlanta one of the most beautiful lectures ever heard here. There was humor in it and laughter, but he handled his theme with such grace and 59tenderness that the vast audience that sat entranced under his magnetic oratory went home in tears.

The lecture course that Mr. Grady instituted was never followed up, although it was a successful one. It was his way, when he had organized an enterprise and placed it on its feet, to turn his attention to something else. Sometimes his successors were equal to the emergency, and sometimes they were not. The Young Men’s Library has been in good hands, and it is what may be termed a successful institution, but it is not what it was when Mr. Grady was booming the town in its behalf. When he put his hand to any enterprise or to any movement the effect seemed to be magical. It was not his personal influence, for there were some enterprises beyond the range of that, that responded promptly to his touch. It was not his enthusiasm, for there have been thousands of men quite as enthusiastic. Was it his methods? Perhaps the secret lies hidden there; but I have often thought, while witnessing the results he brought about, that he had at his command some new element, or quality, or gift not vouchsafed to other men. Whatever it was, he employed it only for the good of his city, his State, his section, and his country. His patriotism was as prominent and as permanent as his unselfishness. His public spirit was unbounded, and, above all things, restless and eager.

I have mentioned only a few of the more important enterprises in Atlanta that owe their success to Mr. Grady. He was identified with every public movement that took shape in Atlanta, and the people were always sure that his interest and his influence were on the side of honesty and justice. But his energies took a wider range. He was the very embodiment of the spirit that he aptly named “the New South,”—the New South that, reverently remembering and emulating the virtues of the old, and striving to forget the bitterness of the past, turns its face to the future and seeks to adapt itself to the conditions with which an unsuccessful struggle has environed it, and to turn them to its profit. Of the New South Mr. Grady was the prophet, 60if not the pioneer. He was never tired of preaching about the rehabilitation of his section. Much of the marvelous development that has taken place in the South during the past ten years has been due to his eager and persistent efforts to call the attention of the world to her vast resources. In his newspaper, in his speeches, in his contributions to Northern periodicals, this was his theme. No industry was too small to command his attention and his aid, and none were larger than his expectations. His was the pen that first drew attention to the iron fields of Alabama, and to the wonderful marble beds and mineral wealth of Georgia. Other writers had preceded him, perhaps, but it is due to his unique methods of advertising that the material resources of the two States are in their present stage of development. He had no individual interest in the development of the material wealth of the South. During the past ten years there was not a day when he was alive that he could not have made thousands of dollars by placing his pen at the disposal of men interested in speculative schemes. He had hundreds of opportunities to write himself rich, but he never fell below the high level of unselfishness that marked his career as boy and man.

There was no limit to his interest in Southern development. The development of the hidden wealth of the hills and valleys, while it appealed strongly to an imagination that had its practical and common-sense side, but not more strongly than the desperate struggle of the farmers of the South in their efforts to recover from the disastrous results of the war while facing new problems of labor and conditions wholly strange. Mr. Grady gave them the encouragement of his voice and pen, striving to teach them the lessons of hope and patience. He was something more than an optimist. He was the embodiment, the very essence, as it seemed—of that smiling faith in the future that brings happiness and contentment, and he had the faculty of imparting his faith to other people. For him the sun was always shining, and he tried to make it shine for other men. At one period, when the farmers of Georgia 61seemed to be in despair, and while there was a notable movement from this State to Georgia, Mr. Grady caused the correspondents of the Constitution to make an investigation into the agricultural situation in Georgia. The result was highly gratifying in every respect. The correspondents did their work well, as, indeed, they could hardly fail to do under the instructions of Mr. Grady. The farmers who had been despondent took heart, and from that time to the present there has been a steady improvement in the status of agriculture in Georgia.

It would be difficult to describe or to give an adequate idea of the work—remarkable in its extent as well as in its character—that Mr. Grady did for Georgia and for the South. It was his keen and hopeful eyes that first saw the fortunes that were to be made in Florida oranges. He wrote for the Constitution in 1877 a series of glowing letters that were full of predictions and figures based on them. The matter was so new at that time, and Mr. Grady’s predictions and estimates seemed to be so extravagant, that some of the editors, irritated by his optimism, as well as by his success as a journalist, alluded to his figures as “Grady’s facts,” and this expression had quite a vogue, even among those who were not unfriendly.

Nevertheless there is not a prediction to be found in Mr. Grady’s Florida letters that has not been fulfilled, and his figures appear to be tame enough when compared with the real results that have been brought about by the orange-growers. Long afterwards he alluded publicly to “Grady’s facts,” accepted its application, and said he was proud that his facts always turned out to be facts.

It would be impossible to enumerate the practical subjects with which Mr. Grady dealt in the Constitution. In the editorial rooms he was continually suggesting the exhaustive treatment of some matter of real public interest, and in the majority of instances, after making the suggestion to one of his writers, he would treat the subject himself in his own inimitable style. His pleasure trips were often itineraries in behalf of the section he was visiting. 62He went on a pleasure trip to Southern Georgia on one occasion, and here are the headlines of a few of the letters he sent back: “Berries and Politics,” “The Savings of the Georgia Farmers,” “The Largest Strawberry Farm in the State,” “A Wandering Bee, and How it Made the LeConte Pear,” “The Turpentine Industries.” All these are suggestive. Each letter bore some definite relation to the development of the resources of the State.

To Mr. Grady, more than to any other man, is due the development of the truck gardens and watermelon farms of southern and southwest Georgia. When he advised in the Constitution the planting of watermelons for shipment to the North, the proposition was hooted at by some of the rival editors, but he “boomed” the business, as the phrase is, and to-day the watermelon business is an established industry, and thousands of farmers are making money during what would otherwise be a dull season of the year. And so with hundreds of other things. His suggestions were always practicable, though they were sometimes so unique as to invite the criticism of the thoughtless, and they were always for the benefit of others—for the benefit of the people. How few men, even though they live to a ripe old age, leave behind them such a record of usefulness and unselfish devotion as that of this man, who died before his prime!

VII.

Mr. Grady’s editorial methods were as unique as all his other methods. They can be described, but they cannot be explained. He had an instinctive knowledge of news in its embryonic state; he seemed to know just where and when a sensation or a startling piece of information would develop itself, and he was always ready for it. Sometimes it seemed to grow and develop under his hands, and his insight and information were such that what appeared to be an ordinary news item would suddenly become, under his manipulation and interpretation, of the first importance. It was this faculty that enabled him to make the Constitution 63one of the leading journals of the country in its method of gathering and treating the news.

Mr. Grady was not as fond of the editorial page as might be supposed. Editorials were very well in their way—capital in an emergency—admirable when a nail was to be clinched, so to speak—but most important of all to his mind was the news and the treatment of it. The whirl of events was never too rapid for him. The most startling developments, the most unexpected happenings, always found him ready to deal with them instantly and in just the right way.

He magnified the office of reporting, and he had a great fancy for it himself. There are hundreds of instances where he voluntarily assumed the duties of a reporter after he became managing editor. A case in point is the work he did on the occasion of the Charleston earthquake. The morning after that catastrophe he was on his way to Charleston. He took a reporter with him, but he preferred to do most of the work. His graphic descriptions of the disaster in all its phases—his picturesque grouping of all the details—were the perfection of reporting, and were copied all over the country. The reporter who accompanied Mr. Grady had a wonderful tale to tell on his return. To the people of that desolate town, the young Georgian seemed to carry light and hope. Hundreds of citizens were encamped on the streets. Mr. Grady visited these camps, and his sympathetic humor brought a smile to many a sad face. He went from house to house, and from encampment to encampment, wrote two or three columns of telegraphic matter on his knee, went to his room in the hotel in the early hours of morning, fell on the bed with his clothes on, and in a moment was sound asleep. The reporter never knew the amount of work Mr. Grady had done until he saw it spread out in the columns of the Constitution. Working at high-pressure there was hardly a limit to the amount of copy Mr. Grady could produce in a given time, and it sometimes happened that he dictated an editorial to his stenographer while writing a news article.

64He did a good deal of his more leisurely newspaper work at home, with his wife and children around him. He never wrote on a table or desk, but used a lapboard or a pad, leaning back in his chair with his feet as high as his head. His house was always a centre of attraction, and when visitors came in Mrs. Grady used to tell them that they needn’t mind Henry. The only thing that disturbed him on such occasions was when the people in the room conversed in a tone so low that he failed to hear what they were saying. When this happened he would look up from his writing with a quick “What’s that?” This often happened in the editorial rooms, and he would frequently write while taking part in a conversation, never losing the thread of his article or of the talk.

As I have said, he reserved his editorials for occasions or emergencies, and it was then that his luminous style showed at its best. He employed always the apt phrase; he was, in fact a phrase-builder. His gift of expression was something marvelous, and there was something melodious and fluent about his more deliberate editorials that suggested the movement of verse. I was reading awhile ago his editorial appealing to the people of Atlanta on the cold Christmas morning which has already been alluded to in this sketch. It is short—not longer than the pencil with which he wrote it, but there is that about it calculated to stir the blood, even now. Above any other man I have ever known Mr. Grady possessed the faculty of imparting his personal magnetism to cold type; and even such a statement as this is an inadequate explanation of the swift and powerful effect that his writings had on the public mind.

He had a keen eye for what, in a general way, may be called climaxes. Thus he was content to see the daily Constitution run soberly and sedately along during the week if it developed into a great paper on Sunday. He did more editorial work for the Sunday paper than for any other issue, and bent all his energies toward making an impression on that day. There was nothing about the 65details of the paper that he did not thoroughly understand. He knew more about the effects of type combinations than the printers did; he knew as much about the business department as the business manager; and he could secure more advertisements in three hours than his advertising clerks could solicit in a week. It used to be said of him that he lacked the business faculty. I suppose the remark was based on the fact that, in the midst of all the tremendous booms he stirred up, and the enterprises he fostered, he remained comparatively poor. I think he purposely neglected the opportunities for private gain that were offered him. There can be no more doubt of his business qualification than there can be of the fact that he neglected opportunities for private gain; but his business faculties were given to the service of the public—witness his faultless management of two of the greatest expositions ever held in the South. Had he served his own interests one-half as earnestly as he served those of the people, he would have been a millionaire. As it was, he died comparatively poor.

Mr. Grady took great pride in the Weekly Constitution, and that paper stands to-day a monument to his business faculty and to his wonderful methods of management. When Mr. Grady took hold of the weekly edition, it had about seven thousand subscribers, and his partners thought that the field would be covered when the list reached ten thousand. To-day the list of subscribers is not far below two hundred thousand, and is larger than that of the weekly edition of any other American newspaper. Just how this result has been brought about it is impossible to say. His methods were not mysterious, perhaps, but they did not lie on the surface. The weekly editions of newspapers that have reached large circulations depend on some specialty—as, for instance, the Detroit Free Press with the popular sketches of M. Quad, and the Toledo Blade, with the rancorous, but still popular, letters of Petroleum V. Nasby. The Weekly Constitution has never depended on such things. It has had, and still has, the letters of Bill Arp, 66of Sarge Wier, and of Betsey Hamilton, homely humorists all, but Mr. Grady took great pains never to magnify these things into specialties. Contributions that his assistants thought would do for the weekly, Mr. Grady would cut out relentlessly.

It sometimes happened that subscribers would begin to fall off. Then Mr. Grady would send for the manager of the weekly department, and proceed to caucus with him, as the young men around the office termed the conference. During the next few days there would be a great stir in the weekly department, and in the course of a fortnight the list of subscribers would begin to grow again. Once, when talking about the weekly, Mr. Grady remarked in a jocular way that when subscriptions began to flow in at the rate of two thousand a day, he wanted to die. Singularly enough, when he was returning from Boston, having been seized with the sickness that was so soon to carry him off, the business manager telegraphed him that more than two thousand subscribers had been received the day before.

In the midst of the manifold duties and responsibilities that he had cheerfully taken on his shoulders, there came to Mr. Grady an ardent desire to aid in the reconciliation of the North and South, and to bring about a better understanding between them. This desire rapidly grew into a fixed and solemn purpose. His first opportunity was an invitation to the banquet of the New England Society, which he accepted with great hesitation. The wonderful effect of his speech at that banquet, and the tremendous response of applause and approval that came to him from all parts of the country, assured him that he had touched the key-note of the situation, and he knew then that his real mission was that of Pacificator. There was a change in him from that time forth, though it was a change visible only to friendly and watchful eyes. He put away something of his boyishness, and became, as it seemed, a trifle more thoughtful. His purpose developed into a mission, and grew in his mind, and shone in his eyes, and remained with him day and night. He made many speeches after 67that, frequently in little out-of-the-way country places, but all of them had a national significance and national bearing. He was preaching the sentiments of harmony, fraternity, and good will to the South as well as to the North.

He prepared his Boston speech with great care, not merely to perfect its form, but to make it worthy of the great cause he had at heart, and in its preparation he departed widely from his usual methods of composition. He sent his servants away, locked himself in Mrs. Grady’s room, and would not tolerate interruptions from any source. His memory was so prodigious that whatever he wrote was fixed in his mind, so that when he had once written out a speech, he needed the manuscript no more. Those who were with him say that he did not confine himself to the printed text of the Boston speech, but made little excursions suggested by his surroundings. Nevertheless, that speech, as it stands, reaches the high-water mark of modern oratory. It was his last, as it was his best, contribution to the higher politics of the country—the politics that are above partisanry and self-seeking.

VIII.

From Boston Mr. Grady came home to die. It was known that he was critically ill, but his own life had been so hopeful and so bright, that when the announcement of his death was made the people of Atlanta were paralyzed, and the whole country shocked. It was a catastrophe so sudden and so far-reaching that even sorrow stood dumb for a while. The effects of such a calamity were greater than sorrow could conceive or affection contemplate. Men who had only a passing acquaintance with him wept when they heard of his death. Laboring men spoke of him with trembling lips and tearful eyes, and working-women went to their tasks in the morning crying bitterly. Never again will there come to Atlanta a calamity that shall so profoundly touch the hearts of the people—that shall so encompass the town with the spirit of mourning.

68I feel that I have been unable, in this hastily written sketch, to do justice to the memory of this remarkable man. I have found it impossible to describe his marvelous gifts, his wonderful versatility, or the genius that set him apart from other men. The new generations that arise will bring with them men who will be fitted to meet the emergencies that may arise, men fitted to rule and capable of touching the popular heart; but no generation will ever produce a genius so versatile, a nature so rare and so sweet, a character so perfect and beautiful, a heart so unselfish, and a mind of such power and vigor, as those that combined to form the unique personality of Henry W. Grady. Never again, it is to be feared, will the South have such a wise and devoted leader, or sectional unity so brilliant a champion, or the country so ardent a lover, or humanity so unselfish a friend, or the cause of the people so eloquent an advocate.

HENRY WOODFIN GRADY was born in Athens, Georgia, May 17, 1851, and died in Atlanta, Georgia, December 23, 1889.

His father, William S. Grady, was a native of North Carolina, and lived in that State until about the year 1846, when he moved to Athens, Georgia. He was a man of vigorous energy, sterling integrity, and great independence of character. He was not literary by profession, but devoted himself to mercantile pursuits, and accumulated what was in those days considered a handsome fortune. Soon after moving to Georgia to live, he married Miss Gartrell, a woman of rare strength of character and deep religious nature. Their married life was sanctified by love of God, and made happy by a consistent devotion to each other.

They had three children, Henry Woodfin, William S., Jr., and Martha. Henry Grady’s father was an early volunteer in the Confederate Army. He organized and equipped a company, of which he was unanimously elected captain, and went at once to Virginia, where he continued in active service until he lost his life in one of the battles before Petersburg. During his career as a soldier he bore himself with such conspicuous valor, that he was accorded the rare distinction of promotion on the field for gallantry.

He fought in defense of his convictions, and fell “a martyr for conscience’ sake.”

His widow, bereft of her helpmate, faced alone the grave responsibility of rearing her three young children.

70She led them in the ways of righteousness and truth, and always sweetened their lives with the tenderness of indulgence, and the beauty of devotion. Two of them still live to call her blessed.

If memorials were meant only for the day and generation in which they are written, who would venture upon the task of preparing one to Henry W. Grady? His death occasioned such wide grief, and induced such unprecedented demonstrations of sorrow, that nothing can be commensurate with those impressive evidences of the unrivaled place he held in the homage of his countrymen.

No written memorial can indicate the strong hold he had upon the Southern people, nor portray that peerless personality which gave him his marvelous power among men. He had a matchless grace of soul that made him an unfailing winner of hearts. His translucent mind pulsated with the light of truth and beautified all thought. He grew flowers in the garden of his heart and sweetened the world with the perfume of his spirit. His endowments were so superior, and his purposes so unselfish, that he seemed to combine all the best elements of genius, and live under the influence of Divine inspiration.

As both a writer and a speaker, he was phenomenally gifted. There was no limit, either to the power or witchery of his pen. In his masterful hand, it was as he chose, either the mighty instrument which Richelieu described, or the light wand of a poet striking off the melody of song, though not to the music of rhyme. In writing a political editorial, or an article on the industrial development of the South, or anything else to which he was moved by an inspiring sense of patriotism or conviction of duty, he was logical, aggressive, and unanswerable. When building an air-castle over the framework of his fancy, or when pouring out his soul in some romantic dream, or when sounding the depth of human feeling by an appeal for Charity’s sake, his command of language was as boundless as the realm of thought, his ideas as beautiful as pictures in the sky, and his pathos as deep as the well of tears. As an orator, he 71had no equal in the South. He literally mastered his audience regardless of their character, chaining them to the train of his thought and carrying them captive to conviction. He moved upon their souls like the Divine Spirit upon the waters, either lashing them into storms of enthusiasm, or stilling them into the restful quiet of sympathy. He was like no other man—he was a veritable magician. He could invest the most trifling thing with proportions of importance not at all its own. He could transform a homely thought into an expression of beauty beneath his wondrous touch. From earliest childhood he possessed that indefinable quality which compels hero-worship.

In the untimely ending of his brilliant and useful career—an ending too sudden to be called less than tragic—there came an affliction as broad as the land he loved, and a grief well-nigh universal. Atlanta lamented her foremost citizen; Georgia mourned her peerless son; the New South agonized over the fall of her intrepid leader; and the heart of the nation was athrob with sorrow when the announcement went forth—“Henry W. Grady is dead.”

The power of his personality, the vital force of his energy, and the scope of his genius, had always precluded the thought that death could touch him, and hence, when he fell a victim to the dread destroyer, there was a terrible shock felt, and sorrow rolled like a tempest over the souls of the Southern people.

The swift race he ran, and the lofty heights he attained, harmonized well with God’s munificent endowment of him. In every field that he labored, his achievements were so wonderful, that a faithful account of his career sounds more like the extravagance of eulogy, than like a record of truth. Of his very early boyhood no account is essential to the purposes of this sketch. It is unnecessary to give any details of him prior to the time when he was a student in the University of Georgia, at Athens. From that institution he was graduated in 1868.

During his college days, he was a boy of bounding spirit, who, by an inexplicable power over his associates, 72made for himself an unchallenged leadership in all things with which he concerned himself. He was not a close student. He never studied his text-books more than was necessary to guarantee his rising from class to class, and to finally secure his diploma. He had no fondness for any department of learning except belles-lettres. In that branch of study he stood well, simply because it was to his liking. The sciences, especially mathematics, were really distasteful to him. He was an omnivorous reader. Every character of Dickens was as familiar to him as a personal friend. That great novelist was his favorite author. He read widely of history, and had a great memory for dates and events. He reveled in poetry as a pastime, but never found anything that delighted him more than “Lucile.” He learned that love-song literally by heart.

While at college his best intellectual efforts were made in his literary and debating society. He aspired to be anniversarian of his society, and his election seemed a foregone conclusion. He was, however, over-confident of success in the last days of the canvass, and when the election came off was beaten by one vote. This was his first disappointment, and went hard with him. He could not bring himself to understand how anything toward the accomplishment of which he had bent his energy could fail. His defeat proved a blessing in disguise, for the following year a place of higher honor, namely that of “commencement orator” was instituted at the University, and to that he was elected by acclamation. This was the year of his graduation, and the speech he made was the sensation of commencement. His subject was “Castles in Air,” and in the treatment of his poetic theme he reveled in that wonderful power of word painting for which he afterwards became so famous. Even in those early days, he wrote and spoke with a fluency of expression, and brilliancy of fancy, that were incomparable.

In all the relations of college life he was universally popular. He had a real genius for putting himself en rapport with all sorts and conditions of men. His sympathy 73was quick-flowing and kind. Any sight or story of suffering would touch his heart and make the tears come. His generosity, like a great river, ran in ceaseless flow and broadening course toward the wide ocean of humanity. He lived in the realization of its being “more blessed to give than to receive.” He never stopped to consider the worthiness of an object, but insisted that a man was entitled to some form of selfishness, and said his was the self-indulgence which he experienced in giving.

There was an old woman in Athens, who was a typical professional beggar. She wore out everybody’s charity except Grady’s. He never tired helping her. One day he said, just after giving her some money, “I do hope old Jane will not die as long as I live in Athens. If she does, my most unfailing privilege of charity will be cut off.” A princely liberality marked everything he did. His name never reduced the average of a subscription list, but eight times out of ten it was down for the largest amount.

By his marked individuality of character, and evidences of genius, even as a boy he impressed himself upon all those with whom he came in contact.

Immediately after his graduation at Athens, he went to the University of Virginia, not so much with a determination to broaden his scholastic attainments, as with the idea that in that famous institution he would be inspired to a higher cultivation of his inborn eloquence. From the day he entered the University of Virginia, he had only one ambition, and that was to be “society orator.” He made such a profound impression in the Washington Society that his right to the honor he craved was scarcely disputed. In the public debates, he swept all competitors before him. About two weeks before the Society’s election of its orator, he had routed every other aspirant from the field, and it seemed he would be unanimously chosen. However, when election day came, that same over-confidence which cost him defeat at Athens lost him victory at Charlottesville. This disappointment nearly broke his heart. He came back home crestfallen and dispirited, and but for the 74wonderful buoyancy of his nature, he might have succumbed permanently to the severe blow which had been struck at his youthful aspirations and hopes.

It was not long after his return to Georgia before he determined to make journalism his life-work. At once he began writing newspaper letters on all sorts of subjects, trusting to his genius to give interest to purely fanciful topics, which had not the slightest flavor of news. Having thus felt his way out into the field of his adoption, he soon went regularly into newspaper business.

Just about this time, and before he had attained his majority, he married Miss Julia King, of Athens. She was the first sweetheart of his boyhood, and kept that hallowed place always. Her beauty and grace of person, united to her charms of character, made her the queen of his life and the idol of his love. She, with two children (a boy and girl), survive him.

In his domestic life he was tender and indulgent to his family, and generously hospitable to his friends. The very best side of him was always turned toward his hearthstone, and there he dispensed the richest treasures of his soul. His home was his castle, and in it his friends were always made happy by the benediction of his welcome.

Soon after marriage he moved to Rome, Georgia, and established himself in the joint ownership, and editorial management of the Rome Commercial, which paper, instead of prospering, was soon enveloped in bankruptcy, costing Mr. Grady many thousands of dollars. Shortly after this he moved to Atlanta, and formed a partnership with Col. Robert Alliston in founding the Atlanta Herald. The conduct of that paper was a revelation in Georgia journalism. Grady and Alliston combined probably more genius than any two men who have ever owned a paper together in that State. They made the columns of the Herald luminous. They also put into it more push and enterprise than had ever been known in that section. They sacrificed everything to daily triumph, regardless of cost or consequences. They went so far as to charter an engine in order that they 75might put their morning edition in Macon, Georgia, by breakfast time. This was a feat never before dreamed of in Georgia. They accomplished the unprecedented undertaking, but in doing that, and other things of unwarranted extravagance, it was not long before the Atlanta Herald went “lock, stock and barrel,” into the wide-open arms of the Sheriff. In this venture Mr. Grady not only sunk all of his personal fortune which remained after the Rome wreck, but involved himself considerably in debt. Thus at twenty-three years of age, he was a victim to disappointment in the only two pronounced ambitions he had ever had, and was depressed by the utter failure of the only two business enterprises in which he had ever engaged.

He made another effort, and started a weekly paper called the Atlanta Capital. This, however, soon went the sorrowing way of his other hopes.

While those failures and disappointments seemed cruel set-backs in that day, looked at now they may be counted to have been no more than healthful discipline to him. They served to stir his spirit the deeper, and fill him with nobler resolve. Bravely he trampled misfortune under his feet, and climbed to the high place of honor and usefulness for which he was destined.

In the day of his extreme poverty, instead of despairing he took on new strength and courage that equipped him well for future triumphs. When it is remembered that his vast accomplishments and national reputation were compassed within the next fourteen years, the record is simply amazing.

Fourteen years ago, Henry W. Grady stood in Atlanta, Georgia, bankrupt and almost broken-hearted. Everything behind him was blotted by failure, and nothing ahead of him was lighted with promise. In that trying day he borrowed fifty dollars, and giving twenty of it to his faithful wife, took the balance and determined to invest it in traveling as far as it would carry him from the scene of his discouragements. He had one offer then open to him, namely, the editorial management of the Wilmington 76(North Carolina) Star, at a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. It was the only thing that seemed a guarantee against actual want, and he had about determined to accept it, when yielding to the influence of pure presentiment, instead of buying a ticket to Wilmington with his thirty dollars, he bought one to New York City.

He landed here with three dollars and seventy-five cents, and registered at the Astor House in order to be in easy reach of Newspaper Row.

He used to tell the story of his experience on that occasion in this way: “After forcing down my unrelished breakfast on the morning of my arrival in New York, I went out on the sidewalk in front of the Astor House, and gave a bootblack twenty-five cents, one-fifth of which was to pay for shining my shoes, and the balance was a fee for the privilege of talking to him. I felt that I would die if I did not talk to somebody. Having stimulated myself at that doubtful fountain of sympathy, I went across to the Herald office, and the managing editor was good enough to admit me to his sanctum. It happened that just at that time several of the Southern States were holding constitutional conventions. The Herald manager asked me if I knew anything about politics, I replied that I knew very little about anything else. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘sit at this desk and write me an article on State conventions in the South.’ With these words he tossed me a pad and left me alone in the room. When my task-master returned, I had finished the article and was leaning back in the chair with my feet up on the desk. ‘Why, Mr. Grady, what is the matter?’ asked the managing editor. ‘Nothing,’ I replied, ‘except that I am through.’ ‘Very well, leave your copy on the desk, and if it amounts to anything I will let you hear from me. Where are you stopping?’ ‘I am at the Astor House.’ Early the next morning before getting out of bed, I rang for a hall-boy and ordered the Herald. I actually had not strength to get up and dress myself, until I could see whether or not my article had been used. I opened the Herald with a trembling hand, 77and when I saw that ‘State Conventions in the South’ was on the editorial page, I fell back on the bed, buried my face in the pillow, and cried like a child. When I went back to the Herald office that day the managing editor received me cordially and said, ‘You can go back to Georgia, Mr. Grady, and consider yourself in the employ of the Herald.’”

Almost immediately after his return to Atlanta, he was tendered, and gladly accepted, a position on the editorial staff of the Atlanta Constitution. He worked vigorously for the New York Herald for five years as its Southern correspondent, and in that time did some of the most brilliant work that has ever been done for that excellent journal.

Notable among his achievements were the graphic reports he made of the South Carolina riots in 1876. But the special work which gave him greatest fame was his exposure of the election frauds in Florida that same year. He secured the memorable confession of Dennis and his associates, and his report of it to the Herald was exclusive. For that piece of work alone, Mr. Bennett paid him a thousand dollars. His attachment to the editorial staff of the Atlanta Constitution gave him an opportunity to impress himself upon the people of Georgia, which he did with great rapidity and power.

In 1879, he came to New York, partly for recreation and partly for the purpose of writing a series of topical letters from Gotham. While here he was introduced by Governor John B. Gordon to Cyrus W. Field. Mr. Field was instantly impressed by him, and liked him so much that he loaned him twenty thousand dollars with which to buy one-fourth interest in the Atlanta Constitution. He made the purchase promptly, and that for which he paid twenty thousand dollars in 1880, was at the time of his death in 1889 worth at least one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The enormous increase in the value of the Constitution during his identification with it shows nothing more plainly than the value of his marvelous work in its service.

Securing an interest in the Atlanta Constitution may be 78said to have fixed his noble destiny. It emancipated his genius from the bondage of poverty, quickened his sensitive spirit with a new consciousness of power for good, and inspired him to untiring service in the widest fields of usefulness. He saw the hand of God in the favor that had blessed him, and in acknowledgment of the Divine providence dedicated his life to the cause of truth, and the uplifting of humanity. Atlanta was his home altar, and there he poured out the best libations of his heart. That thriving city to-day has no municipal advantage, no public improvement, no educational institution, no industrial enterprise which does not either owe its beginning to his readiness of suggestion, or its mature development to his sustaining influence. Its streets are paved with his energy and devotion, its houses are built in the comeliness and fashion that he inspired, and its vast business interests are established in the prosperity and strength that he foretold.

Georgia was the pride of his life, and for the increase of her peace and prosperity, the deepening brotherhood of her people, the development of her vast mineral resources, and the enrichment of her varied harvests, he wrote, and talked, and prayed.

The whole South was to him sacred ground, made so both by the heroic death of his father and the precious birth of his children. By the former, he felt all the memories and traditions of the Old South to have been sanctified, and by the latter he felt all the hopes and aspirations of the New South to have been beautified. And thus with a personality altogether unique, and a genius thoroughly rare, he stood like a magical link between the past and the future. Turning toward the days that were gone, he sealed them with a holy kiss; and then looking toward the time that had not yet come, he conjured it with a voice of prophecy.

In politics he was an undeniable leader, and yet never held office. High places were pressed for his acceptance times without number, but he always resolutely put them away from him, insisting that office had no charm for him. He could have gone to Congress, as representative from the 79State at large, if he would only have consented to serve. His name was repeatedly suggested for the governorship of Georgia, but he invariably suppressed the idea promptly, urging his friends to leave him at peace in his private station.

In spite of his indifference to all political preferment, it is universally believed in Georgia, that had he lived, he would have soon been sent to the United States Senate. Although he had no love of office for himself, he was the incomparable Warwick of his day. He was almost an absolute dictator in Georgia politics. No man cared to stand for election to any place, high or low, unless he felt Grady was with him. He certainly was the most powerful factor in the election of two Governors, and practically gave more than one United States Senator his seat. His power extended all over the State.

Such a man could not be held within the narrow limits of local reputation. It mattered not how far he traveled from home, he made himself quickly known by the power of his impressive individuality, or by some splendid exhibition of his genius.

By two speeches, one made at a banquet of the New England Society in New York City, and the other at a State fair at Dallas, Texas, he achieved for himself a reputation which spanned the continent. The most magnificent effort of eloquence which he ever made was the soul-stirring speech delivered in Boston on “The Race Problem,” just ten days before he died. These three speeches were enough to confirm and perpetuate his fame as a surpassing orator.

It is impossible to give any adequate idea of Henry Grady’s largeness of heart, nobility of soul, and brilliancy of mind. Those three elements combined in royal abundance to make his princely nature.

When Georgia’s great triumvirate died, their spirits seemed to linger on earth in the being of Henry W. Grady. While he lived he perpetuated the political sagacity of Alexander H. Stephens, the consummate genius of Robert Toombs, and the impassioned eloquence of Benjamin H. Hill.

80True greatness is immortal. Real patriotic purposes are never swallowed up in death. Good works well begun live long after their praiseworthy originators have ascended in glory. If there is any truth in these reflections, they are precious and priceless to all who mourn the untimely taking off of Henry Woodfin Grady.

His sudden death struck grief to all true-hearted American citizens. In him was combined such breadth of usefulness and brilliancy of genius, that he illumined the critical period of American history in which he lived, and set the firmament of our national glory with many a new and shining star of promise. This century, though old in its last quarter, has given birth to but one Henry Woodfin Grady, and it will close its eyes long before his second self is seen.

A hundred years hence, when sweet charity is stemming the tides of suffering in the world, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This blessed work is an echo from Henry Grady’s life on earth. A hundred years hence, when friendship is building high her altars of self-sacrifice in the name of love and loyalty, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This beautiful service is going on as a perpetual memorial to Henry Grady’s life on earth. A hundred years hence, when all the South shall have been enriched by the development of her vast natural resources, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This is the legitimate fruit of Henry Grady’s labor of love while he lived on earth. A hundred years hence, when patriotism shall have beaten down all sectional and partisan prejudice, and the burning problems that press upon our national heart to-day shall have been “solved in patience and fairness,” if truth is not dumb, she will say: This is the glorious verification of Henry Grady’s prophetic utterances while on earth. And when in God’s own appointed time this nation shall lead all other nations of the earth in the triumphal march of prosperous peoples under perfect governments, if truth is not dumb, she will say: This is the free, full and complete answer to Henry Grady’s impassioned prayer while on earth.

ON the 21st of December, 1886, Mr. Grady, in response to an urgent invitation, delivered the following Address at the Banquet of the New England Club, New York:

“There was a South of slavery and secession—that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour.” These words, delivered from the immortal lips of Benjamin H. Hill, at Tammany Hall, in 1866, true then and truer now, I shall make my text to-night.

Mr. President and Gentlemen: Let me express to you my appreciation of the kindness by which I am permitted to address you. I make this abrupt acknowledgment advisedly, for I feel that if, when I raise my provincial voice in this ancient and august presence, I could find courage for no more than the opening sentence, it would be well if in that sentence I had met in a rough sense my obligation as a guest, and had perished, so to speak, with courtesy on my lips and grace in my heart. Permitted, through your kindness, to catch my second wind, let me say that I appreciate the significance of being the first Southerner to speak at this board, which bears the substance, if it surpasses the semblance, of original New England hospitality—and honors the sentiment that in turn honors you, but in which my personality is lost, and the compliment to my people made plain.

I bespeak the utmost stretch of your courtesy to-night. I am not troubled about those from whom I come. You 84remember the man whose wife sent him to a neighbor with a pitcher of milk, and who, tripping on the top step, fell with such casual interruptions as the landings afforded into the basement, and, while picking himself up, had the pleasure of hearing his wife call out: “John, did you break the pitcher?”

“No, I didn’t,” said John, “but I’ll be dinged if I don’t.”

So, while those who call me from behind may inspire me with energy, if not with courage, I ask an indulgent hearing from you. I beg that you will bring your full faith in American fairness and frankness to judgment upon what I shall say. There was an old preacher once who told some boys of the Bible lesson he was going to read in the morning. The boys, finding the place, glued together the connecting pages. The next morning he read on the bottom of one page, “When Noah was one hundred and twenty years old he took unto himself a wife, who was”—then turning the page—“140 cubits long—40 cubits wide, built of gopher wood—and covered with pitch inside and out.” He was naturally puzzled at this. He read it again, verified it, and then said: “My friends, this is the first time I ever met this in the Bible, but I accept this as an evidence of the assertion that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.” If I could get you to hold such faith to-night I could proceed cheerfully to the task I otherwise approach with a sense of consecration.

Pardon me one word, Mr. President, spoken for the sole purpose of getting into the volumes that go out annually freighted with the rich eloquence of your speakers—the fact that the Cavalier as well as the Puritan was on the continent in its early days, and that he was “up and able to be about.” I have read your books carefully and I find no mention of that fact, which seems to me an important one for preserving a sort of historical equilibrium if for nothing else.

Let me remind you that the Virginia Cavalier first challenged France on the continent—that Cavalier, John 85Smith, gave New England its very name, and was so pleased with the job that he has been handing his own name around ever since—and that while Myles Standish was cutting off men’s ears for courting a girl without her parents’ consent, and forbade men to kiss their wives on Sunday, the Cavalier was courting everything in sight, and that the Almighty had vouchsafed great increase to the Cavalier colonies, the huts in the wilderness being as full as the nests in the woods.

But having incorporated the Cavalier as a fact in your charming little books, I shall let him work out his own salvation, as he has always done, with engaging gallantry, and we will hold no controversy as to his merits. Why should we? Neither Puritan nor Cavalier long survived as such. The virtues and good traditions of both happily still live for the inspiration of their sons and the saving of the old fashion. But both Puritan and Cavalier were lost in the storm of the first Revolution, and the American citizen, supplanting both and stronger than either, took possession of the republic bought by their common blood and fashioned to wisdom, and charged himself with teaching men government and establishing the voice of the people as the voice of God.

My friends, Dr. Talmage has told you that the typical American has yet to come. Let me tell you that he has already come. Great types, like valuable plants, are slow to flower and fruit. But from the union of these colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, slow perfecting through a century, came he who stands as the first typical American, the first who comprehended within himself all the strength and gentleness, all the majesty and grace of this republic—Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than Puritan, greater than Cavalier, in that he was American, and that in his honest form were first gathered the vast and thrilling 86forces of his ideal government—charging it with such tremendous meaning and elevating it above human suffering that martyrdom, though infamously aimed, came as a fitting crown to a life consecrated from the cradle to human liberty. Let us, each cherishing the traditions and honoring his fathers, build with reverent hands to the type of this simple but sublime life, in which all types are honored, and in our common glory as Americans there will be plenty and to spare for your forefathers and for mine.

Dr. Talmage has drawn for you, with a master’s hand, the picture of your returning armies. He has told you how, in the pomp and circumstance of war, they came back to you, marching with proud and victorious tread, reading their glory in a nation’s eyes! Will you bear with me while I tell you of another army that sought its home at the close of the late war—an army that marched home in defeat and not in victory—in pathos and not in splendor, but in glory that equaled yours, and to hearts as loving as ever welcomed heroes home! Let me picture to you the footsore Confederate soldier, as buttoning up in his faded gray jacket the parole which was to bear testimony to his children of his fidelity and faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox in April, 1865. Think of him as ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, enfeebled by want and wounds, having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings the hands of his comrades in silence, and lifting his tear-stained and pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot old Virginia hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and painful journey. What does he find—let me ask you who went to your homes eager to find, in the welcome you had justly earned, full payment for four years’ sacrifice—what does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half so much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful? He finds his house in ruins, his farm devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless, his social 87system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status; his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone. Without money, credit, employment, material, or training; and beside all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence—the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves.

What does he do—this hero in gray with a heart of gold? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him of his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never before so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches into the furrow; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plow, and fields that ran red with human blood in April were green with the harvest in June; women reared in luxury cut up their dresses and made breeches for their husbands, and, with a patience and heroism that fit women always as a garment, gave their hands to work. There was little bitterness in all this. Cheerfulness and frankness prevailed. “Bill Arp” struck the key-note when he said: “Well, I killed as many of them as they did of me, and now I’m going to work.” Of the soldier returning home after defeat and roasting some corn on the roadside, who made the remark to his comrades: “You may leave the South if you want to, but I am going to Sandersville, kiss my wife and raise a crop, and if the Yankees fool with me any more, I’ll whip ’em again.” I want to say to General Sherman, who is considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire, that from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city; that somehow or other we have caught the sunshine in the bricks and mortar of our homes, and have builded therein not one ignoble prejudice or memory.

But what is the sum of our work? We have found out that in the summing up the free negro counts more than he 88did as a slave. We have planted the schoolhouse on the hilltop and made it free to white and black. We have sowed towns and cities in the place of theories, and put business above politics. We have challenged your spinners in Massachusetts and your iron-makers in Pennsylvania. We have learned that the $400,000,000 annually received from our cotton crop will make us rich when the supplies that make it are home-raised. We have reduced the commercial rate of interest from 24 to 6 per cent., and are floating 4 per cent. bonds. We have learned that one northern immigrant is worth fifty foreigners; and have smoothed the path to southward, wiped out the place where Mason and Dixon’s line used to be, and hung out latchstring to you and yours. We have reached the point that marks perfect harmony in every household, when the husband confesses that the pies which his wife cooks are as good as those his mother used to bake; and we admit that the sun shines as brightly and the moon as softly as it did before the war. We have established thrift in city and country. We have fallen in love with work. We have restored comfort to homes from which culture and elegance never departed. We have let economy take root and spread among us as rank as the crabgrass which sprung from Sherman’s cavalry camps, until we are ready to lay odds on the Georgia Yankee as he manufactures relics of the battle-field in a one-story shanty and squeezes pure olive oil out of his cotton seed, against any down-easter that ever swapped wooden nutmegs for flannel sausage in the valleys of Vermont. Above all, we know that we have achieved in these “piping times of peace” a fuller independence for the South than that which our fathers sought to win in the forum by their eloquence or compel in the field by their swords.

It is a rare privilege, sir, to have had part, however humble, in this work. Never was nobler duty confided to human hands than the uplifting and upbuilding of the prostrate and bleeding South—misguided, perhaps, but beautiful in her suffering, and honest, brave and generous always. In the record of her social, industrial and political 89illustration we await with confidence the verdict of the world.

But what of the negro? Have we solved the problem he presents or progressed in honor and equity toward solution? Let the record speak to the point. No section shows a more prosperous laboring population than the negroes of the South, none in fuller sympathy with the employing and land-owning class. He shares our school fund, has the fullest protection of our laws and the friendship of our people. Self-interest, as well as honor, demand that he should have this. Our future, our very existence depend upon our working out this problem in full and exact justice. We understand that when Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, your victory was assured, for he then committed you to the cause of human liberty, against which the arms of man cannot prevail—while those of our statesmen who trusted to make slavery the corner-stone of the Confederacy doomed us to defeat as far as they could, committing us to a cause that reason could not defend or the sword maintain in sight of advancing civilization.

Had Mr. Toombs said, which he did not say, “that he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill,” he would have been foolish, for he might have known that whenever slavery became entangled in war it must perish, and that the chattel in human flesh ended forever in New England when your fathers—not to be blamed for parting with what didn’t pay—sold their slaves to our fathers—not to be praised for knowing a paying thing when they saw it. The relations of the southern people with the negro are close and cordial. We remember with what fidelity for four years he guarded our defenseless women and children, whose husbands and fathers were fighting against his freedom. To his eternal credit be it said that whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his 90helpless charges, and worthy to be taken in loving grasp by every man who honors loyalty and devotion. Ruffians have maltreated him, rascals have misled him, philanthropists established a bank for him, but the South, with the North, protests against injustice to this simple and sincere people. To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense. It must be left to those among whom his lot is cast, with whom he is indissolubly connected, and whose prosperity depends upon their possessing his intelligent sympathy and confidence. Faith has been kept with him, in spite of calumnious assertions to the contrary by those who assume to speak for us or by frank opponents. Faith will be kept with him in the future, if the South holds her reason and integrity.

But have we kept faith with you? In the fullest sense, yes. When Lee surrendered—I don’t say when Johnson surrendered, because I understand he still alludes to the time when he met General Sherman last as the time when he determined to abandon any further prosecution of the struggle—when Lee surrendered, I say, and Johnson quit, the South became, and has since been, loyal to this Union. We fought hard enough to know that we were whipped, and in perfect frankness accept as final the arbitrament of the sword to which we had appealed. The South found her jewel in the toad’s head of defeat. The shackles that had held her in narrow limitations fell forever when the shackles of the negro slave were broken. Under the old régime the negroes were slaves to the South; the South was a slave to the system. The old plantation, with its simple police regulations and feudal habit, was the only type possible under slavery. Thus was gathered in the hands of a splendid and chivalric oligarchy the substance that should have been diffused among the people, as the rich blood, under certain artificial conditions, is gathered at the heart, filling that with affluent rapture but leaving the body chill and colorless.

The old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, 91unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth. The new South presents a perfect democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement—a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core—a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace—and a diversified industry that meets the complex need of this complex age.

The new South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life. The light of a grander day is falling fair on her face. She is thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed, and her brave armies were beaten.

This is said in no spirit of time-serving or apology. The South has nothing for which to apologize. She believes that the late struggle between the States was war and not rebellion; revolution and not conspiracy, and that her convictions were as honest as yours. I should be unjust to the dauntless spirit of the South and to my own convictions if I did not make this plain in this presence. The South has nothing to take back. In my native town of Athens is a monument that crowns its central hill—a plain, white shaft. Deep cut into its shining side is a name dear to me above the names of men—that of a brave and simple man who died in brave and simple faith. Not for all the glories of New England, from Plymouth Rock all the way, would I exchange the heritage he left me in his soldier’s death. To the foot of that I shall send my children’s children to reverence him who ennobled their name with his heroic blood. But, sir, speaking from the shadow of that memory which I honor as I do nothing else on earth, I say that the cause in which he suffered and for which he gave his life was adjudged by higher and fuller wisdom than his or 92mine, and I am glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty hand and that human slavery was swept forever from American soil, the American Union was saved from the wreck of war.

This message, Mr. President, comes to you from consecrated ground. Every foot of soil about the city in which I live is as sacred as a battle-ground of the republic. Every hill that invests it is hallowed to you by the blood of your brothers who died for your victory, and doubly hallowed to us by the blow of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat—sacred soil to all of us—rich with memories that make us purer and stronger and better—silent but staunch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms—speaking an eloquent witness in its white peace and prosperity to the indissoluble union of American States and the imperishable brotherhood of the American people.

Now, what answer has New England to this message? Will she permit the prejudice of war to remain in the hearts of the conquerors, when it has died in the hearts of the conquered? Will she transmit this prejudice to the next generation, that in their hearts which never felt the generous ardor of conflict it may perpetuate itself? Will she withhold, save in strained courtesy, the hand which straight from his soldier’s heart Grant offered to Lee at Appomattox? Will she make the vision of a restored and happy people, which gathered above the couch of your dying captain, filling his heart with grace; touching his lips with praise, and glorifying his path to the grave—will she make this vision on which the last sigh of his expiring soul breathed a benediction, a cheat and delusion? If she does, the South, never abject in asking for comradeship, must accept with dignity its refusal; but if she does not refuse to accept in frankness and sincerity this message of good will and friendship, then will the prophecy of Webster, delivered in this very society forty years ago amid tremendous applause, become true, be verified in its fullest sense, when he said: “Standing hand to 93hand and clasping hands, we should remain united as we have been for sixty years, citizens of the same country, members of the same government, united, all united now and united forever.” There have been difficulties, contentions, and controversies, but I tell you that in my judgment,

AT the Dallas, Texas, State Fair, on the 26th of October, 1887, Mr. Grady was the Orator of the Day. He said:

“Who saves his country, saves all things, and all things saved will bless him. Who lets his country die, lets all things die, and all things dying curse him.”

These words are graven on the statue of Benjamin H. Hill in the city of Atlanta, and in their spirit I shall speak to you to-day.

Mr. President and Fellow-Citizens: I salute the first city of the grandest State of the greatest government on this earth. In paying earnest compliment to this thriving city, and this generous multitude, I need not cumber speech with argument or statistics. It is enough to say that my friends and myself make obeisance this morning to the chief metropolis of the State of Texas. If it but holds this pre-eminence—and who can doubt in this auspicious presence that it will—the uprising tides of Texas’s prosperity will carry it to glories unspeakable. For I say in soberness, the future of this marvelous and amazing empire, that gives broader and deeper significance to statehood by accepting its modest naming, the mind of man can neither measure nor comprehend.

I shall be pardoned for resisting the inspiration of this presence and adhering to-day to blunt and rigorous speech—for there are times when fine words are paltry, and this seems to me to be such a time. So I shall turn away 95from the thunders of the political battle upon which every American hangs intent, and repress the ardor that at this time rises in every American heart—for there are issues that strike deeper than any political theory has reached, and conditions of which partisanry has taken, and can take, but little account. Let me, therefore, with studied plainness, and with such precision as is possible—in a spirit of fraternity that is broader than party limitations, and deeper than political motive—discuss with you certain problems upon the wise and prompt solution of which depends the glory and prosperity of the South.

But why—for let us make our way slowly—why “the South.” In an indivisible union—in a republic against the integrity of which sword shall never be drawn or mortal hand uplifted, and in which the rich blood gathering at the common heart is sent throbbing into every part of the body politic—why is one section held separated from the rest in alien consideration? We can understand why this should be so in a city that has a community of local interests; or in a State still clothed in that sovereignty of which the debates of peace and the storm of war has not stripped her. But why should a number of States, stretching from Richmond to Galveston, bound together by no local interests, held in no autonomy, be thus combined and drawn to a common center? That man would be absurd who declaimed in Buffalo against the wrongs of the Middle States, or who demanded in Chicago a convention for the West to consider the needs of that section. If then it be provincialism that holds the South together, let us outgrow it; if it be sectionalism, let us root it out of our hearts; but if it be something deeper than these and essential to our system, let us declare it with frankness, consider it with respect, defend it with firmness, and in dignity abide its consequence. What is it that holds the southern States—though true in thought and deed to the Union—so closely bound in sympathy to-day? For a century these States championed a governmental theory—but that, having triumphed in every forum, fell at last by the sword. 96They maintained an institution—but that, having been administered in the fullest wisdom of man, fell at last in the higher wisdom of God. They fought a war—but the prejudices of that war have died, its sympathies have broadened, and its memories are already the priceless treasure of the republic that is cemented forever with its blood. They looked out together upon the ashes of their homes and the desolation of their fields—but out of pitiful resource they have fashioned their homes anew, and plenty rides on the springing harvests. In all the past there is nothing to draw them into essential or lasting alliance—nothing in all that heroic record that cannot be rendered unfearing from provincial hands into the keeping of American history.

But the future holds a problem, in solving which the South must stand alone; in dealing with which, she must come closer together than ambition or despair have driven her, and on the outcome of which her very existence depends. This problem is to carry within her body politic two separate races, and nearly equal in numbers. She must carry these races in peace—for discord means ruin. She must carry them separately—for assimilation means debasement. She must carry them in equal justice—for to this she is pledged in honor and in gratitude. She must carry them even unto the end, for in human probability she will never be quit of either.

This burden no other people bears to-day—on none hath it ever rested. Without precedent or companionship, the South must bear this problem, the awful responsibility of which should win the sympathy of all human kind, and the protecting watchfulness of God—alone, even unto the end. Set by this problem apart from all other peoples of the earth, and her unique position emphasized rather than relieved, as I shall show hereafter, by her material conditions, it is not only fit but it is essential that she should hold her brotherhood unimpaired, quicken her sympathies, and in the light or in the shadows of this surpassing problem work out her own salvation in the fear of God—but of God alone.

97What shall the South do to be saved? Through what paths shall she reach the end? Through what travail, or what splendors, shall she give to the Union this section, its wealth garnered, its resources utilized, and its rehabilitation complete—and restore to the world this problem solved in such justice as the finite mind can measure, or finite hands administer?

In dealing with this I shall dwell on two points.

First, the duty of the South in its relation to the race problem.

Second, the duty of the South in relation to its no less unique and important industrial problem.

I approach this discussion with a sense of consecration. I beg your patient and cordial sympathy. And I invoke the Almighty God, that having showered on this people His fullest riches has put their hands to this task, that He will draw near unto us, as He drew near to troubled Israel, and lead us in the ways of honor and uprightness, even through a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night.

What of the negro? This of him. I want no better friend than the black boy who was raised by my side, and who is now trudging patiently with downcast eyes and shambling figure through his lowly way in life. I want no sweeter music than the crooning of my old “mammy,” now dead and gone to rest, as I heard it when she held me in her loving arms, and bending her old black face above me stole the cares from my brain, and led me smiling into sleep. I want no truer soul than that which moved the trusty slave, who for four years while my father fought with the armies that barred his freedom, slept every night at my mother’s chamber door, holding her and her children as safe as if her husband stood guard, and ready to lay down his humble life on her threshold. History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during the war. Often five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety, and the unprotected homes rested in peace. Unmarshaled, the black battalions moved patiently 98to the fields in the morning to feed the armies their idleness would have starved, and at night gathered anxiously at the big house to “hear the news from marster,” though conscious that his victory made their chains enduring. Everywhere humble and kindly; the bodyguard of the helpless; the rough companion of the little ones; the observant friend; the silent sentry in his lowly cabin; the shrewd counselor. And when the dead came home, a mourner at the open grave. A thousand torches would have disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted. When the master going to a war in which slavery was involved said to his slave, “I leave my home and loved ones in your charge,” the tenderness between man and master stood disclosed. And when the slave held that charge sacred through storm and temptation, he gave new meaning to faith and loyalty. I rejoice that when freedom came to him after years of waiting, it was all the sweeter because the black hands from which the shackles fell were stainless of a single crime against the helpless ones confided to his care.

From this root, imbedded in a century of kind and constant companionship, has sprung some foliage. As no race had ever lived in such unresisting bondage, none was ever hurried with such swiftness through freedom into power. Into hands still trembling from the blow that broke the shackles, was thrust the ballot. In less than twelve months from the day he walked down the furrow a slave, the negro dictated in legislative halls from which Davis and Calhoun had gone forth, the policy of twelve commonwealths. When his late master protested against his misrule, the federal drum-beat rolled around his strong-holds, and from a hedge of federal bayonets he grinned in good-natured insolence. From the proven incapacity of that day has he far advanced? Simple, credulous, impulsive—easily led and too often easily bought, is he a safer, more intelligent citizen now than then? Is this mass of votes, loosed from old restraints, inviting alliance or awaiting opportunity, less menacing than when its purpose was plain and its way direct?

99My countrymen, right here the South must make a decision on which very much depends. Many wise men hold that the white vote of the South should divide, the color line be beaten down, and the southern States ranged on economic or moral questions as interest or belief demands. I am compelled to dissent from this view. The worst thing in my opinion that could happen is that the white people of the South should stand in opposing factions, with the vast mass of ignorant or purchasable negro votes between. Consider such a status. If the negroes were skillfully led,—and leaders would not be lacking,—it would give them the balance of power—a thing not to be considered. If their vote was not compacted, it would invite the debauching bid of factions, and drift surely to that which was the most corrupt and cunning. With the shiftless habit and irresolution of slavery days still possessing him, the negro voter will not in this generation, adrift from war issues, become a steadfast partisan through conscience or conviction. In every community there are colored men who redeem their race from this reproach, and who vote under reason. Perhaps in time the bulk of this race may thus adjust itself. But, through what long and monstrous periods of political debauchery this status would be reached, no tongue can tell.

The clear and unmistakable domination of the white race, dominating not through violence, not through party alliance, but through the integrity of its own vote and the largeness of its sympathy and justice through which it shall compel the support of the better classes of the colored race,—that is the hope and assurance of the South. Otherwise, the negro would be bandied from one faction to another. His credulity would be played upon, his cupidity tempted, his impulses misdirected, his passions inflamed. He would be forever in alliance with that faction which was most desperate and unscrupulous. Such a state would be worse than reconstruction, for then intelligence was banded, and its speedy triumph assured. But with intelligence and property divided—bidding and overbidding 100for place and patronage—irritation increasing with each conflict—the bitterness and desperation seizing every heart—political debauchery deepening, as each faction staked its all in the miserable game—there would be no end to this, until our suffrage was hopelessly sullied, our people forever divided, and our most sacred rights surrendered.

One thing further should be said in perfect frankness. Up to this point we have dealt with ignorance and corruption—but beyond this point a deeper issue confronts us. Ignorance may struggle to enlightenment, out of corruption may come the incorruptible. God speed the day when,—every true man will work and pray for its coming,—the negro must be led to know and through sympathy to confess that his interests and the interests of the people of the South are identical. The men who, from afar off, view this subject through the cold eye of speculation or see it distorted through partisan glasses, insist that, directly or indirectly, the negro race shall be in control of the affairs of the South. We have no fears of this; already we are attaching to us the best elements of that race, and as we proceed our alliance will broaden; external pressure but irritates and impedes. Those who would put the negro race in supremacy would work against infallible decree, for the white race can never submit to its domination, because the white race is the superior race. But the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards—because the white race is the superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts.

In political compliance the South has evaded the truth, and men have drifted from their convictions. But we cannot escape this issue. It faces us wherever we turn. It is an issue that has been, and will be. The races and tribes of earth are of Divine origin. Behind the laws of man and the decrees of war, stands the law of God. What God hath 101separated let no man join together. The Indian, the Malay, the Negro, the Caucasian, these types stand as markers of God’s will. Let not man tinker with the work of the Almighty. Unity of civilization, no more than unity of faith, will never be witnessed on earth. No race has risen, or will rise, above its ordained place. Here is the pivotal fact of this great matter—two races are made equal in law, and in political rights, between whom the caste of race has set an impassable gulf. This gulf is bridged by a statute, and the races are urged to cross thereon. This cannot be. The fiat of the Almighty has gone forth, and in eighteen centuries of history it is written. We would escape this issue if we could. From the depths of its soul the South invokes from heaven “peace on earth, and good will to man.” She would not, if she could, cast this race back into the condition from which it was righteously raised. She would not deny its smallest or abridge its fullest privilege. Not to lift this burden forever from her people, would she do the least of these things. She must walk through the valley of the shadow, for God has so ordained. But he has ordained that she shall walk in that integrity of race, that created in His wisdom has been perpetuated in His strength. Standing in the presence of this multitude, sobered with the responsibility of the message I deliver to the young men of the South, I declare that the truth above all others to be worn unsullied and sacred in your hearts, to be surrendered to no force, sold for no price, compromised in no necessity, but cherished and defended as the covenant of your prosperity, and the pledge of peace to your children, is that the white race must dominate forever in the South, because it is the white race, and superior to that race by which its supremacy is threatened.

It is a race issue. Let us come to this point, and stand here. Here the air is pure and the light is clear, and here honor and peace abide. Juggling and evasion deceives not a man. Compromise and subservience has carried not a point. There is not a white man North or South who does not feel it stir in the gray matter of his brain and throb in 102his heart. Not a negro who does not feel its power. It is not a sectional issue. It speaks in Ohio, and in Georgia. It speaks wherever the Anglo-Saxon touches an alien race. It has just spoken in universally approved legislation in excluding the Chinaman from our gates, not for his ignorance, vice or corruption, but because he sought to establish an inferior race in a republic fashioned in the wisdom and defended by the blood of a homogeneous people.

The Anglo-Saxon blood has dominated always and everywhere. It fed Alfred when he wrote the charter of English liberty; it gathered about Hampden as he stood beneath the oak; it thundered in Cromwell’s veins as he fought his king; it humbled Napoleon at Waterloo; it has touched the desert and jungle with undying glory; it carried the drumbeat of England around the world and spread on every continent the gospel of liberty and of God: it established this republic, carved it from the wilderness, conquered it from the Indians, wrested it from England, and at last, stilling its own tumult, consecrated it forever as the home of the Anglo-Saxon, and the theater of his transcending achievement. Never one foot of it can be surrendered while that blood lives in American veins, and feeds American hearts, to the domination of an alien and inferior race.

And yet that is just what is proposed. Not in twenty years have we seen a day so pregnant with fate to this section as the sixth of next November. If President Cleveland is then defeated, which God forbid, I believe these States will be led through sorrows compared to which the woes of reconstruction will be as the fading dews of morning to the roaring flood. To dominate these States through the colored vote, with such aid as federal patronage may debauch or federal power deter, and thus through its chosen instruments perpetuate its rule, is in my opinion the settled purpose of the Republican party. I am appalled when I measure the passion in which this negro problem is judged by the leaders of the party. Fifteen years ago Vice-President Wilson said—and I honor his memory as 103that of a courageous man: “We shall not have finished with the South until we force its people to change their thought, and think as we think.” I repeat these words, for I heard them when a boy, and they fell on my ears as the knell of my people’s rights—“to change their thought, and make them think as we think.” Not enough to have conquered our armies—to have decimated our ranks, to have desolated our fields and reduced us to poverty, to have struck the ballot from our hands and enfranchised our slaves—to have held us prostrate under bayonets while the insolent mocked and thieves plundered—but their very souls must be rifled of their faiths, their sacred traditions cudgeled from memory, and their immortal minds beaten into subjection until thought had lost its integrity, and we were forced “to think as they think.” And just now General Sherman has said, and I honor him as a soldier:

“The negro must be allowed to vote, and his vote must be counted; otherwise, so sure as there is a God in heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions. Should the negro strike that blow, in seeming justice, there will be millions to assist them.”

And this General took Johnston’s sword in surrender! He looked upon the thin and ragged battalions in gray, that for four years had held his teeming and heroic legions at bay. Facing them, he read their courage in their depleted ranks, and gave them a soldier’s parole. When he found it in his heart to taunt these heroes with this threat, why—careless as he was twenty years ago with fire, he is even more careless now with his words. If we could hope that this problem would be settled within our lives I would appeal from neither madness nor unmanliness. But when I know that, strive as I may, I must at last render this awful heritage into the untried hands of my son, already dearer to me than my life, and that he must in turn bequeath it unsolved to his children, I cry out against the inhumanity that deepens its difficulties with this incendiary 104threat, and beclouds its real issue with inflaming passion.

This problem is not only enduring, but it is widening. The exclusion of the Chinese is the first step in the revolution that shall save liberty and law and religion to this land, and in peace and order, not enforced on the gallows or at the bayonet’s end, but proceeding from the heart of an harmonious people, shall secure in the enjoyment of these rights, and the control of this republic, the homogeneous people that established and has maintained it. The next step will be taken when some brave statesman, looking Demagogy in the face, shall move to call to the stranger at our gates, “Who comes here?” admitting every man who seeks a home, or honors our institutions, and whose habit and blood will run with the native current; but excluding all who seek to plant anarchy or to establish alien men or measures on our soil; and will then demand that the standard of our citizenship be lifted and the right of acquiring our suffrage be abridged. When that day comes, and God speed its coming, the position of the South will be fully understood, and everywhere approved. Until then, let us—giving the negro every right, civil and political, measured in that fullness the strong should always accord the weak—holding him in closer friendship and sympathy than he is held by those who would crucify us for his sake—realizing that on his prosperity ours depends—let us resolve that never by external pressure, or internal division, shall he establish domination, directly or indirectly, over that race that everywhere has maintained its supremacy. Let this resolution be cast on the lines of equity and justice. Let it be the pledge of honest, safe and impartial administration, and we shall command the support of the colored race itself, more dependent than any other on the bounty and protection of government. Let us be wise and patient, and we shall secure through its acquiescence what otherwise we should win through conflict, and hold in insecurity.

All this is no unkindness to the negro—but rather that 105he may be led in equal rights and in peace to his uttermost good. Not in sectionalism—for my heart beats true to the Union, to the glory of which your life and heart is pledged. Not in disregard of the world’s opinion—for to render back this problem in the world’s approval is the sum of my ambition, and the height of human achievement. Not in reactionary spirit—but rather to make clear that new and grander way up which the South is marching to higher destiny, and on which I would not halt her for all the spoils that have been gathered unto parties since Catiline conspired, and Cæsar fought. Not in passion, my countrymen, but in reason—not in narrowness, but in breadth—that we may solve this problem in calmness and in truth, and lifting its shadows let perpetual sunshine pour down on two races, walking together in peace and contentment. Then shall this problem have proved our blessing, and the race that threatened our ruin work our salvation as it fills our fields with the best peasantry the world has ever seen. Then the South—putting behind her all the achievements of her past—and in war and in peace they beggar eulogy—may stand upright among the nations and challenge the judgment of man and the approval of God, in having worked out in their sympathy, and in His guidance, this last and surpassing miracle of human government.

What of the South’s industrial problem? When we remember that amazement followed the payment by thirty-seven million Frenchmen of a billion dollars indemnity to Germany, that the five million whites of the South rendered to the torch and sword three billions of property—that thirty million dollars a year, or six hundred million dollars in twenty years, has been given willingly of our poverty as pensions for Northern soldiers, the wonder is that we are here at all. There is a figure with which history has dealt lightly, but that, standing pathetic and heroic in the genesis of our new growth, has interested me greatly—our soldier-farmer of ’65. What chance had he for the future as he wandered amid his empty barns, his 106stock, labor, and implements gone—gathered up the fragments of his wreck—urging kindly his borrowed mule—paying sixty per cent. for all that he bought, and buying all on credit—his crop mortgaged before it was planted—his children in want, his neighborhood in chaos—working under new conditions and retrieving every error by a costly year—plodding all day down the furrow, hopeless and adrift, save when at night he went back to his broken home, where his wife, cheerful even then, renewed his courage, while she ministered to him in loving tenderness. Who would have thought as during those lonely and terrible days he walked behind the plow, locking the sunshine in the glory of his harvest, and spreading the showers and the verdure of his field—no friend near save nature that smiled at his earnest touch, and God that sent him the message of good cheer through the passing breeze and the whispering leaves—that he would in twenty years, having carried these burdens uncomplaining, make a crop of $800,000,000. Yet this he has done, and from his bounty the South has rebuilded her cities, and recouped her losses. While we exult in his splendid achievement, let us take account of his standing.

Whence this enormous growth? For ten years the world has been at peace. The pioneer has now replaced the soldier. Commerce has whitened new seas, and the merchant has occupied new areas. Steam has made of the earth a chess-board, on which men play for markets. Our western wheat-grower competes in London with the Russian and the East Indian. The Ohio wool grower watches the Australian shepherd, and the bleat of the now historic sheep of Vermont is answered from the steppes of Asia. The herds that emerge from the dust of your amazing prairies might hear in their pauses the hoof-beats of antipodean herds marching to meet them. Under Holland’s dykes, the cheese and butter makers fight American dairies. The hen cackles around the world. California challenges vine-clad France. The dark continent is disclosed through meshes of light. There is competition 107everywhere. The husbandman, driven from his market, balances price against starvation, and undercuts his rival. This conflict often runs to panic, and profit vanishes. The Iowa farmer burning his corn for fuel is not an unusual type.

Amid this universal conflict, where stands the South? While the producer of everything we eat or wear, in every land, is fighting through glutted markets for bare existence, what of the southern farmer? In his industrial as in his political problem he is set apart—not in doubt, but in assured independence. Cotton makes him king. Not the fleeces that Jason sought can rival the richness of this plant, as it unfurls its banners in our fields. It is gold from the instant it puts forth its tiny shoot. The shower that whispers to it is heard around the world. The trespass of a worm on its green leaf means more to England than the advance of the Russians on her Asiatic outposts. When its fibre, current in every bank, is marketed, it renders back to the South $350,000,000 every year. Its seed will yield $60,000,000 worth of oil to the press and $40,000,000 in food for soil and beast, making the stupendous total of $450,000,000 annual income from this crop. And now, under the Tompkins patent, from its stalk—news paper is to be made at two cents per pound. Edward Atkinson once said: “If New England could grow the cotton plant, without lint, it would make her richest crop; if she held monopoly of cotton lint and seed she would control the commerce of the world.”

But is our monopoly, threatened from Egypt, India and Brazil, sure and permanent? Let the record answer. In ’72 the American supply of cotton was 3,241,000 bales,—foreign supply 3,036,000. We led our rivals by less than 200,000 bales. This year the American supply is 8,000,000 bales—from foreign sources, 2,100,000, expressed in bales of four hundred pounds each. In spite of new areas elsewhere, of fuller experience, of better transportation, and unlimited money spent in experiment, the supply of foreign cotton has decreased since ’72 nearly 1,000,000 bales, while 108that of the South has increased nearly 5,000,000. Further than this: Since 1872, population in Europe has increased 13 per cent., and cotton consumption in Europe has increased 50 per cent. Still further: Since 1880 cotton consumption in Europe has increased 28 per cent., wool only 4 per cent., and flax has decreased 11 per cent. As for new areas, the uttermost missionary woos the heathen with a cotton shirt in one hand and the Bible in the other, and no savage I believe has ever been converted to one, without adopting the other. To summarize: Our American fibre has increased its product nearly three-fold, while it has seen the product of its rival decrease one-third. It has enlarged its dominion in the old centers of population, supplanting flax and wool, and it peeps from the satchel of every business and religious evangelist that trots the globe. In three years the American crop has increased 1,400,000 bales, and yet there is less cotton in the world to-day than at any time for twenty years. The dominion of our king is established; this princely revenue assured, not for a year, but for all time. It is the heritage that God gave us when he arched our skies, established our mountains, girt us about with the ocean, tempered the sunshine, and measured the rain—ours and our children’s forever.

Not alone in cotton, but in iron, does the South excel. The Hon. Mr. Norton, who honors this platform with his presence, once said to me: “An Englishman of the highest character predicted that the Atlantic will be whitened within our lives with sails carrying American iron and coal to England.” When he made that prediction the English miners were exhausting the coal in long tunnels above which the ocean thundered. Having ores and coal stored in exhaustless quantity, in such richness, and in such adjustment, that iron can be made and manufacturing done cheaper than elsewhere on this continent, is to now command, and at last control, the world’s market for iron. The South now sells iron, through Pittsburg, in New York. She has driven Scotch iron first from the interior, and finally from American ports. Within our lives she will 109cross the Atlantic, and fulfill the Englishman’s prophecy. In 1880 the South made 212,000 tons of iron. In 1887, 845,000 tons. She is now actually building, or has finished this year, furnaces that will produce more than her entire product of last year. Birmingham alone will produce more iron in 1889 than the entire South produced in 1887. Our coal supply is exhaustless, Texas alone having 6000 square miles. In marble and granite we have no rivals, as to quantity or quality. In lumber our riches are even vaster. More than fifty per cent. of our entire area is in forests, making the South the best timbered region of the world. We have enough merchantable yellow pine to bring, in money, $2,500,000,000—a sum the vastness of which can only be understood when I say it nearly equaled the assessed value of the entire South, including cities, forests, farms, mines, factories and personal property of every description whatsoever. Back of this our forests of hard woods, and measureless swamps of cypress and gum. Think of it. In cotton a monopoly. In iron and coal establishing swift mastery. In granite and marble developing equal advantage and resource. In yellow pine and hard woods the world’s treasury. Surely the basis of the South’s wealth and power is laid by the hand of the Almighty God, and its prosperity has been established by divine law which work in eternal justice and not by taxes levied on its neighbors through human statutes. Paying tribute for fifty years that under artificial conditions other sections might reach a prosperity impossible under natural laws, it has grown apace—and its growth shall endure if its people are ruled by two maxims, that reach deeper than legislative enactment, and the operation of which cannot be limited by artificial restraint, and but little hastened by artificial stimulus.

First. No one crop will make a people prosperous. If cotton held its monopoly under conditions that made other crops impossible—or under allurements that made other crops exceptional—its dominion would be despotism.

Whenever the greed for a money crop unbalances the wisdom of husbandry, the money crop is a curse. When 110it stimulates the general economy of the farm, it is the profiting of farming. In an unprosperous strip of Carolina, when asked the cause of their poverty, the people say, “Tobacco—for it is our only crop.” In Lancaster, Pa., the richest American county by the census, when asked the cause of their prosperity, they say, “Tobacco—for it is the golden crown of a diversified agriculture.” The soil that produces cotton invites the grains and grasses, the orchard and the vine. Clover, corn, cotton, wheat, and barley thrive in the same inclosure; the peach, the apple, the apricot, and the Siberian crab in the same orchard. Herds and flocks graze ten months every year in the meadows over which winter is but a passing breath, and in which spring and autumn meet in summer’s heart. Sugar-cane and oats, rice and potatoes, are extremes that come together under our skies. To raise cotton and send its princely revenues to the west for supplies, and to the east for usury, would be misfortune if soil and climate forced such a curse. When both invite independence, to remain in slavery is a crime. To mortgage our farms in Boston for money with which to buy meat and bread from western cribs and smokehouses, is folly unspeakable. I rejoice that Texas is less open to this charge than others of the cotton States. With her eighty million bushels of grain, and her sixteen million head of stock, she is rapidly learning that diversified agriculture means prosperity. Indeed, the South is rapidly learning the same lesson; and learned through years of debt and dependence it will never be forgotten. The best thing Georgia has done in twenty years was to raise her oat crop in one season from two million to nine million bushels, without losing a bale of her cotton. It is more for the South that she has increased her crop of corn—that best of grains, of which Samuel J. Tilden said, “It will be the staple food of the future, and men will be stronger and better when that day comes”—by forty-three million bushels this year, than to have won a pivotal battle in the late war. In this one item she keeps at home this year a sum equal to 111the entire cotton crop of my State that last year went to the west.

This is the road to prosperity. It is the way to manliness and sturdiness of character. When every farmer in the South shall eat bread from his own fields and meat from his own pastures, and disturbed by no creditor, and enslaved by no debt, shall sit amid his teeming gardens, and orchards, and vineyards, and dairies, and barnyards, pitching his crops in his own wisdom, and growing them in independence, making cotton his clean surplus, and selling it in his own time, and in his chosen market, and not at a master’s bidding—getting his pay in cash and not in a receipted mortgage that discharges his debt, but does not restore his freedom—then shall be breaking the fullness of our day. Great is King Cotton! But to lie at his feet while the usurer and grain-raiser bind us in subjection, is to invite the contempt of man and the reproach of God. But to stand up before him and amid the crops and smokehouses wrest from him the magna charta of our independence, and to establish in his name an ample and diversified agriculture, that shall honor him while it enriches us—this is to carry us as far in the way of happiness and independence as the farmer, working in the fullest wisdom, and in the richest field, can carry any people.

But agriculture alone—no matter how rich or varied its resources—cannot establish or maintain a people’s prosperity. There is a lesson in this that Texas may learn with profit. No commonwealth ever came to greatness by producing raw material. Less can this be possible in the future than in the past. The Comstock lode is the richest spot on earth. And yet the miners, gasping for breath fifteen hundred feet below the earth’s surface, get bare existence out of the splendor they dig from the earth. It goes to carry the commerce and uphold the industry of distant lands, of which the men who produce it get but dim report. Hardly more is the South profited when, stripping the harvest of her cotton fields, or striking her teeming hills, or leveling her superb forests, she sends the raw 112material to augment the wealth and power of distant communities.

Texas produces a million and a half bales of cotton, which yield her $60,000,000. That cotton, woven into common goods, would add $75,000,000 to Texas’s income from this crop, and employ 220,000 operatives, who would spend within her borders more than $30,000,000 in wages. Massachusetts manufactures 575,000 bales of cotton, for which she pays $31,000,000, and sells for $72,000,000, adding a value nearly equal to Texas’s gross revenue from cotton, and yet Texas has a clean advantage for manufacturing this cotton of one per cent a pound over Massachusetts. The little village of Grand Rapids began manufacturing furniture simply because it was set in a timber district. It is now a great city and sells $10,000,000 worth of furniture every year, in making which 125,000 men are employed, and a population of 40,000 people supported. The best pine districts of the world are in eastern Texas. With less competition and wider markets than Grand Rapids has, will she ship her forests at prices that barely support the wood-chopper and sawyer, to be returned in the making of which great cities are built or maintained? When her farmers and herdsmen draw from her cities $126,000,000 as the price of their annual produce, shall this enormous wealth be scattered through distant shops and factories, leaving in the hands of Texas no more than the sustenance, support, and the narrow brokerage between buyer and seller? As one-crop farming cannot support the country, neither can a resource of commercial exchange support a city. Texas wants immigrants—she needs them—for if every human being in Texas were placed at equi-distant points through the State no Texan could hear the sound of a human voice in your broad areas.

So how can you best attract immigration? By furnishing work for the artisan and mechanic if you meet the demand of your population for cheaper and essential manufactured articles. One-half million workers would be needed for this, and with their families would double the 113population of your State. In these mechanics and their dependents farmers would find a market for not only their staple crops but for the truck that they now despise to raise or sell, but is at least the cream of the farm. Worcester county, Mass., takes $720,000,000 of our material and turns out $87,000,000 of products every year, paying $20,000,000 in wages. The most prosperous section of this world is that known as the Middle States of this republic. With agriculture and manufacturers in the balance, and their shops and factories set amid rich and ample acres, the result is such deep and diffuse prosperity as no other section can show. Suppose those States had a monopoly of cotton and coal so disposed as to command the world’s markets and the treasury of the world’s timber, I suppose the mind is staggered in contemplating the majesty of the wealth and power they would attain. What have they that the South lacks?—and to her these things were added, and climate, ampler acres and rich soil. It is a curious fact that three-fourths of the population and manufacturing wealth of this country is comprised in a narrow strip between Iowa and Massachusetts, comprising less than one-sixth of our territory, and that this strip is distant from the source of raw materials on which its growth is based, of hard climate and in a large part of sterile soil. Much of this forced and unnatural development is due to slavery, which for a century fenced enterprise and capital out of the South. Mr. Thomas, who in the Lehigh Valley owned a furnace in 1845 that set that pattern for iron-making in America, had at that time bought mines and forest where Birmingham now stands. Slavery forced him away. He settled in Pennsylvania. I have wondered what would have happened if that one man had opened his iron mines in Alabama and set his furnaces there at that time. I know what is going to happen since he has been forced to come to Birmingham and put up two furnaces nearly forty years after his survey.

Another cause that has prospered New England and the Middle States while the South languished, is the 114system of tariff taxes levied on the unmixed agriculture of these States for the protection of industries to our neighbors to the North, a system on which the Hon. Roger Q. Mills—that lion of the tribe of Judah—has at last laid his mighty paw and under the indignant touch of which it trembles to its center. That system is to be revised and its duties reduced, as we all agree it should be, though I should say in perfect frankness I do not agree with Mr. Mills in it. Let us hope this will be done with care and industrious patience. Whether it stands or falls, the South has entered the industrial list to partake of his bounty if it stands, and if it falls to rely on the favor with which nature has endowed her, and from this immutable advantage to fill her own markets and then have a talk with the world at large.

With amazing rapidity she has moved away from the one-crop idea that was once her curse. In 1880 she was esteemed prosperous. Since that time she has added 393,000,000 bushels to her grain crops, and 182,000,000 head to her live stock. This has not lost one bale of her cotton crop, which, on the contrary, has increased nearly 200,000 bales. With equal swiftness has she moved away from the folly of shipping out her ore at $2 a ton and buying it back in implements from $20 to $100 per ton; her cotton at 10 cents a pound and buying it back in cloth at 20 to 80 cents per pound; her timber at $8 per thousand and buying it back in furniture at ten to twenty times as much. In the past eight years $250,000,000 have been invested in new shops and factories in her States; 225,000 artisans are now working that eight years ago were idle or worked elsewhere, and these added $227,000,000 to the value of her raw material—more than half the value of her cotton. Add to this the value of her increased grain crops and stock, and in the past eight years she has grown in her fields or created in her shops manufactures more than the value of her cotton crop. The incoming tide has begun to rise. Every train brings manufacturers from the East and West seeking to establish themselves or their sons near 115the raw material and in this growing market. Let the fullness of the tide roll in.

It will not exhaust our materials, nor shall we glut our markets. When the growing demand of our southern market, feeding on its own growth, is met, we shall find new markets for the South. Under our new condition many indirect laws of commerce shall be straightened. We buy from Brazil $50,000,000 worth of goods, and sell her $8,500,000. England buys only $29,000,000, and sells her $35,000,000. Of $65,000,000 in cotton goods bought by Central and South America, over $50,000,000 went to England. Of $331,000,000 sent abroad by the southern half of our hemisphere, England secures over half, although we buy from that section nearly twice as much as England. Our neighbors to the south need nearly every article we make; we need nearly everything they produce. Less than 2,500 miles of road must be built to bind by rail the two American continents. When this is done, and even before, we shall find exhaustless markets to the South. Texas shall command, as she stands in the van of this new movement, its richest rewards.

The South, under the rapid diversification of crops and diversification of industries, is thrilling with new life. As this new prosperity comes to us, it will bring no sweeter thought to me, and to you, my countrymen, I am sure, than that it adds not only to the comfort and happiness of our neighbors, but that it makes broader the glory and deeper the majesty, and more enduring the strength, of the Union which reigns supreme in our hearts. In this republic of ours is lodged the hope of free government on earth. Here God has rested the ark of his covenant with the sons of men. Let us—once estranged and thereby closer bound,—let us soar above all provincial pride and find our deeper inspirations in gathering the fullest sheaves into the harvest and standing the staunchest and most devoted of its sons as it lights the path and makes clear the way through which all the people of this earth shall come in God’s appointed time.

116A few words for the young men of Texas. I am glad that I can speak to them at all. Men, especially young men, look back for their inspiration to what is best in their traditions. Thermopylæ cast Spartan sentiments in heroic mould and sustained Spartan arms for more than a century. Thermopylæ had survivors to tell the story of its defeat. The Alamo had none. Though voiceless it shall speak from its dumb walls. Liberty cried out to Texas, as God called from the clouds unto Moses. Bowie and Fanning, though dead still live. Their voices rang above the din of Goliad and the glory of San Jacinto, and they marched with the Texas veterans who rejoiced at the birth of Texas independence. It is the spirit of the Alamo that moved above the Texas soldiers as they charged like demigods through a thousand battle-fields, and it is the spirit of the Alamo that whispers from their graves held in every State of the Union, ennobling their dust, their soil, that was crimsoned with their blood.

In this spirit of this inspiration and in the thrill of the amazing growth that surrounds you, my young friends, it will be strange if the young men of Texas do not carry the lone star into the heart of the struggle. The South needs her sons to-day more than when she summoned them to the forum to maintain her political supremacy, more than when the bugle called them to the field to defend issues put to the arbitrament of the sword. Her old body is instinct with appeal calling on us to come and give her fuller independence than she has ever sought in field or forum. It is ours to show that as she prospered with slaves she shall prosper still more with freemen; ours to see that from the lists she entered in poverty she shall emerge in prosperity; ours to carry the transcending traditions of the old South from which none of us can in honor or in reverence depart, unstained and unbroken into the new. Shall we fail? Shall the blood of the old South—the best strain that ever uplifted human endeavor—that ran like water at duty’s call and never stained where it touched—shall this blood that pours into our veins through 117a century luminous with achievement, for the first time falter and be driven back from irresolute heat, when the old South, that left us a better heritage in manliness and courage than in broad and rich acres, calls us to settle problems? A soldier lay wounded on a hard-fought field, the roar of the battle had died away, and he rested in the deadly stillness of its aftermath. Not a sound was heard as he lay there, sorely smitten and speechless, but the shriek of wounded and the sigh of the dying soul, as it escaped from the tumult of earth into the unspeakable peace of the stars. Off over the field flickered the lanterns of the surgeons with the litter bearers, searching that they might take away those whose lives could be saved and leave in sorrow those who were doomed to die with pleading eyes through the darkness. This poor soldier watched, unable to turn or speak as the lanterns grew near. At last the light flashed in his face, and the surgeon, with kindly face, bent over him, hesitated a moment, shook his head, and was gone, leaving the poor fellow alone with death. He watched in patient agony as they went on from one part of the field to another. As they came back the surgeon bent over him again. “I believe if this poor fellow lives to sundown to-morrow he will get well.” And again leaving him, not to death but with hope; all night long these words fell into his heart as the dews fell from the stars upon his lips, “if he but lives till sundown, he will get well.” He turned his weary head to the east and watched for the coming sun. At last the stars went out, the east trembled with radiance, and the sun, slowly lifting above the horizon, tinged his pallid face with flame. He watched it inch by inch as it climbed slowly up the heavens. He thought of life, its hopes and ambitions, its sweetness and its raptures, and he fortified his soul against despair until the sun had reached high noon. It sloped down its slow descent, and his life was ebbing away and his heart was faltering, and he needed stronger stimulants to make him stand the struggle until the end of the day had come. He thought of his far-off home, the blessed house resting 118in tranquil peace with the roses climbing to its door, and the trees whispering to its windows, and dozing in the sunshine, the orchard and the little brook running like a silver thread through the forest.

“If I live till sundown I will see it again. I will walk down the shady lane: I will open the battered gate, and the mocking-bird shall call to me from the orchard, and I will drink again at the old mossy spring.”

And he thought of the wife who had come from the neighboring farmhouse and put her hand shyly in his, and brought sweetness to his life and light to his home.

“If I live till sundown I shall look once more into her deep and loving eyes and press her brown head once more to my aching breast.”

And he thought of the old father, patient in prayer, bending lower and lower every day under his load of sorrow and old age.

“If I but live till sundown I shall see him again and wind my strong arm about his feeble body, and his hands shall rest upon my head while the unspeakable healing of his blessing falls into my heart.”

And he thought of the little children that clambered on his knees and tangled their little hands into his heart-strings, making to him such music as the world shall not equal or heaven surpass.

“If I live till sundown they shall again find my parched lips with their warm mouths, and their little fingers shall run once more over my face.”

And he then thought of his old mother, who gathered these children about her and breathed her old heart afresh in their brightness and attuned her old lips anew to their prattle, that she might live till her big boy came home.

“If I live till sundown I will see her again, and I will rest my head at my old place on her knees, and weep away all memory of this desolate night.” And the Son of God, who had died for men, bending from the stars, put the hand that had been nailed to the cross on ebbing life and held on the staunch until the sun went down and the stars 119came out, and shone down in the brave man’s heart and blurred in his glistening eyes, and the lanterns of the surgeons came and he was taken from death to life.

The world is a battle-field strewn with the wrecks of government and institutions, of theories and of faiths that have gone down in the ravage of years. On this field lies the South, sown with her problems. Upon the field swings the lanterns of God. Amid the carnage walks the Great Physician. Over the South he bends. “If ye but live until to-morrow’s sundown ye shall endure, my countrymen.” Let us for her sake turn our faces to the east and watch as the soldier watched for the coming sun. Let us staunch her wounds and hold steadfast. The sun mounts the skies. As it descends to us, minister to her and stand constant at her side for the sake of our children, and of generations unborn that shall suffer if she fails. And when the sun has gone down and the day of her probation has ended, and the stars have rallied her heart, the lanterns shall be swung over the field and the Great Physician shall lead her up, from trouble into content, from suffering into peace, from death to life. Let every man here pledge himself in this high and ardent hour, as I pledge myself and the boy that shall follow me; every man himself and his son, hand to hand and heart to heart, that in death and earnest loyalty, in patient painstaking and care, he shall watch her interest, advance her fortune, defend her fame and guard her honor as long as life shall last. Every man in the sound of my voice, under the deeper consecration he offers to the Union, will consecrate himself to the South. Have no ambition but to be first at her feet and last at her service. No hope but, after a long life of devotion, to sink to sleep in her bosom, and as a little child sleeps at his mother’s breast and rests untroubled in the light of her smile.

With such consecrated service, what could we not accomplish; what riches we should gather for her; what glory and prosperity we should render to the Union; what blessings we should gather unto the universal harvest of 120humanity. As I think of it, a vision of surpassing beauty unfolds to my eyes. I see a South, the home of fifty millions of people, who rise up every day to call from blessed cities, vast hives of industry and of thrift; her country-sides the treasures from which their resources are drawn; her streams vocal with whirring spindles; her valleys tranquil in the white and gold of the harvest; her mountains showering down the music of bells, as her slow-moving flocks and herds go forth from their folds; her rulers honest and her people loving, and her homes happy and their hearthstones bright, and their waters still, and their pastures green, and her conscience clear; her wealth diffused and poor-houses empty, her churches earnest and all creeds lost in the gospel. Peace and sobriety walking hand in hand through her borders; honor in her homes; uprightness in her midst; plenty in her fields; straight and simple faith in the hearts of her sons and daughters; her two races walking together in peace and contentment; sunshine everywhere and all the time, and night falling on her generally as from the wings of the unseen dove.

All this, my country, and more can we do for you. As I look the vision grows, the splendor deepens, the horizon falls back, the skies open their everlasting gates, and the glory of the Almighty God streams through as He looks down on His people who have given themselves unto Him and leads them from one triumph to another until they have reached a glory unspeaking, and the whirling stars, as in their courses through Arcturus they run to the milky way, shall not look down on a better people or happier land.

IN November, 1887, at the Augusta Exposition, Mr. Grady delivered the following Address:

“When my eyes for the last time behold the sun in the heavens, may they rest upon the glorious ensign of this republic, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in original lustre, not a star obscured or a stripe effaced, but everywhere blazing in characters of living light all over its ample folds as they wave over land and sea, and in every wind under heaven, that sentiment dear to every American heart, liberty and union now and forever, one and inseparable!”

These words of Daniel Webster, whose brain was the temple of wisdom and whose soul the temple of liberty, inspire my heart as I speak to you to-day.

Ladies and gentlemen: This day is auspicious. Set apart by governor and president for universal thanksgiving, our grateful hearts confirm the consecration. Though we have not been permitted to parade our democratic roosters in jubilant print, we may now lead them from their innocuous desuetude, and making them the basis of this day’s feast, gather about them a company that in cordial grace shall be excelled by none—not even that which invests the republican turkey, whose steaming thighs shall be slipped to-day in Indianapolis, and attacking them with an appetite that comes from abounding health, consign them to that digestion that waits on a conscience void of offense.

We give thanks to-day that the Lord God Almighty, having led us from desolation into plenty, from poverty into substance, from passion into reason, and from estrangement 122into love—having brought the harvests from the ashes, and raised us homes from our ruins, and touched our scarred land all over with beauty and with peace—permits us to assemble here to-day and rejoice amid the garnered heaps of our treasure. Your visitors give thanks because, coming to a city that from deep disaster has risen with energy and courage unequaled, and witnessing an exposition that in the sweep of its mighty arms and the splendor of its gathered riches surpasses all we have attempted, they find all sense of rivalry blotted out in wondering admiration, and from hearts that know not envy or criticism, bid you God-speed to even higher achievement, and to full and swift harvesting of the prosperity to gain which you have builded so bravely and so wisely.

I am thankful, if you will pardon this personal digression, because I now meet face to face, and can render service to a people whose generous words on a late occasion touched my heart more deeply than I shall attempt here to express. I simply say to you now, and I would that my voice could reach every man in Georgia to whom I am in like indebted, that your kindness left no room for resentment or regret; but a heart filled with gratitude and love steadier in its resolution to deserve the approval you so unstintingly gave, and more deeply consecrated to the service of the people, that in giving me their love have given all that I have dared to hope for, and more than I had dared to ask. I know not what the future may hold for the life that recent events have jostled from its accustomed path. It would be affectation to say that I am careless—for, in touching it with your loving confidence, you have kindled inspirations that cherished without guile, may be confessed in frankness. But if it be given to man to read the human heart, and plumb the quicksands of human ambition, I know that I speak the truth when I say that if ever I hold in my grasp any honor, in the winning or wearing of which my State is disadvantaged, and my hand refuses to surrender it, I pray God that in remembrance 123of this hour He will strike it from me forever; and if my ambitious heart rebels, that He will lead it, even through sorrow and humiliation, to know that unworthy laurels will fade on the brow, and that no honor can ennoble, no triumph advance, and no victory satisfy that is not won and worn in the weal of the people and the prosperity of the State.

It gives us pleasure to meet to-day our neighbors from Carolina, and by the banks of this river, more bond than boundary, give them cordial welcome to Georgia. The people of these States, sir, are ancient and honorable friends. When the infant colony that settled Georgia landed from its long voyage it was the hands of Carolinians that helped them ashore, and Carolina’s hospitality that gave them food and shelter. A banquet was served at Beaufort, the details of which proved our ancestors to have been doughty trenchermen, and at which we are not surprised to learn a goodly quantity of most excellent wine was served, nor to learn—for scribes extenuated then as now—that, though the affair was conducted in the most agreeable manner, no one became intoxicated. When the Georgians took up their march to Savannah they carried with them herds from the Carolinians’ folds, and food from their granaries, and an offer from Mr. Whitaker—blessed be his memory!—of a silver spoon for the first male child born on Georgia soil, the first instance, I believe, of a bounty offered or protection guaranteed to an infant industry on this continent. When they settled, it was Carolina gentlemen with their servants that builded the huts and sheltered them, and Carolina captains with their picket men that guarded them from the Indians. As from your slender and pitiful store you gave then bountifully to us, we invite you to-day to share with us our plenty and rejoice with us that what you planted in neighborly kindness hath grown into such greatness.

I am stirred with the profoundest emotion when I reflect upon what the peoples of these two States have endured together. Shoulder to shoulder they have fought 124through two revolutions. Side by side they have fallen on the field of battle, and, brothers even in death, have rested in common graves. Hand clasped in hand, they enjoyed victory together, and together reaped in honor and dignity the fruits of their triumph. Heart locked in heart, they have stood undaunted in the desolation of defeat and, fortified by unfailing comradeship, have wrought gladness and peace from the tumult and bitterness of despair. Of them it may be truly said, they have known no rivalry save that emulation which inspires each, and embitters neither. If we match your Calhoun, one of that trinity that hath most been and shall not be equaled in political record, with our Stephens, who was as acute in expounding, and as devoted in defending the constitution as he; your Hayne, who maintained himself valiantly against the great mastodon in American politics, with our Hill (would that he might be given back to us to-day), who took the ablest debater of the age by the throat and shook him until his eager tongue was stilled and the lips that had slandered the South were livid in shame and confusion; if against McDuffie, eloquent and immortal tribune, we put our Toombs, the Mirabeau of his day, surpassing the Frenchman in eloquence, and stainless of his crimes; if against Legare, both scholar and statesman, we put our Wilde, not surpassed as either; if we proffer Lanier, Barick and Harris, when the praises of Sims, and Hayne, and Timrod are sung, it is only because we rejoice in the strength of each which has honored both, and glorified our great republic. Let the glory of our past history incite us to the future; let the trials we have endured nerve us for trials yet to come, and let Georgia and Carolina, that in prosperity united, in adversity have not been divided, strike hands here to-day in a new compact that shall hold them bound together in comradeship and love as long as the Savannah, laying its lips on the cheeks of either, runs down to the sea.

The South is now confronted by two dangers.

First, that by remaining solid it will force a permanent 125sectional alignment, under which being in minority it has nothing to gain, and everything to lose.

Second, that by dividing it will debauch its political system, destroy the defenses of its social integrity, and put the balance of power in the hands of an ignorant and dangerous class.

Let us discuss these dangers for a moment.

As to the first. I do not doubt that every day the South remains solid, the drift toward a solid North is deepening. The South is solid now in a sense not dreamed of in ante-bellum days. Then we divided on every question save one, that of preserving equal representation in the Senate. Clay championed the protective tariff. Jackson flew at Calhoun’s throat when Carolina threatened to nullify. Polk, of Tennessee, was made president over Clay, of Kentucky. In 1852, Pierce received the vote of twenty-seven States out of thirty-one, though this period marked the height of slavery disturbance. The South was solid then on one thing alone. On all other questions national suffrage knew no sectional lines. To-day the South is a mass of States merged into one; every issue fused in the ardor of one great question, and our 153 electoral votes hurled as a rifle-ball into the electoral college. The tendency of this must be to solidify the North. Indeed, this is already being done. Seymour and Blair, in 1868, on a platform declaring the amendments null and void, were beaten in the North by Grant, the hero of the war, by less than 100,000 votes. Mr. Harrison, twenty years later, beat Cleveland with a flawless record and a careful platform, over 450,000 votes in the northern States. The solid South invites the solid North. From this status the South has little to hope. The North is already in the majority. More than five million immigrants have poured into her States in the past ten years, and will be declared in the next census. Four new States will give her eight new senators and twelve electoral votes. In the South but one State has kept pace with the West—and that one, Texas, has largely gained at the expense of the Atlantic States. 126The South had thirty-eight per cent. of the electoral vote in 1880. It is doubtful if she will have over twenty-five per cent. in 1890. To remain solid, therefore, is to incur the danger of being placed in perpetual minority, and practically shut out from participation in the government, into which Georgia and Massachusetts came as equals—that was fashioned in their common wisdom, defended in their common blood, and bought of their common treasure.

But what of the other danger? Can we risk that to avoid the first? I am sure we cannot. The very worst thing that could happen to the South is to have her white vote divided into factions, and each faction bidding for the negro who holds the balance of power. What is this negro vote? In every southern State it is considerable, and I fear it is increasing. It is alien, being separated by racial differences that are deep and permanent. It is ignorant—easily deluded or betrayed. It is impulsive—lashed by a word into violence. It is purchasable, having the incentive of poverty and cupidity, and the restraint of neither pride nor conviction. It can never be merged through logical or orderly currents into either of two parties, if two should present themselves. We cannot be rid of it. There it is, a vast mass of impulsive, ignorant and purchasable votes. With no factions between which to swing it has no play or dislocation; but thrown from one faction to another it is the loosed cannon on the storm-tossed ship. There is no community that would deliberately tempt this danger; no social or political fabric that could stand its strain. The Tweed ring, backed by a similar and less irresponsible following than a shrewd clique could rally and control in every southern State, and daring less of plunder and insolence than that following would sanction or support, blotted out party lines in New York, and made its intelligence and integrity as solid as the South ever was. Party lines were promptly recast because New York had to deal with the vicious, who once punished may be trusted to sulk in quiet while their wounds heal. We deal with the ignorant, that scourged from power to-day, may be deluded 127to-morrow into assaulting the very position from which they have been lashed. Never did robbers find followers more to their mind than the emancipated slaves of reconstruction days. Ignorant and confiding, they could be committed to any excess, led to any outrage. Deep as was the degradation to which these sovereign States were carried, and heavy as is the burden they left on this impoverished people, it was only when the white race, rallying from the graves of its dead and the ashes of its homes, closed its decimated ranks, and fronting federal bayonets, and defying federal power, stood like a stone wall before the uttermost temples of its liberty and credit, and the hideous drama closed, that the miserable assault was checked.

Shall those ranks be broken while the danger still threatens?

Let the whites divide, what happens? Here is this dangerous and alien influence that holds the balance of power. It cannot be won by argument, for it is without information, understanding or traditions—hence without convictions. It must be bought by race privileges granted as such, or by money paid outright. Let us follow this in its twofold aspect. One faction gives the negro certain privileges and wins. The other offers more. The first bids under, and so the sickening work goes on until the barriers that now protect the social integrity and peace of both races are swept away. The negro gains nothing, for he secures these spoils and privileges not by deserving them, or qualifying himself for them, but as the plunder of an irritating struggle in which he loses that largeness of sympathy and tolerance that is at last essential to his well-being and advancement. The other aspect is as bad. One side puts up five thousand dollars for the purchase of the negro vote and wins. The other, declining at first to corrupt the suffrage, but realizing at last that the administration on which his life and property depends is at stake, doubles this, and so the debauching deepens until at last such enormous sums are spent that they must be recouped from the public treasuries. Good men disgusted go to the rear. The shrewd 128and unscrupulous are put to the front, and the negro, carrying with him the balance of power, falls at last into the grasp of the faction which is most cunning and conscienceless. National parties, finding here their cheapest market and widest field, will pour millions into the South, adding to the corruption funds of municipal and State factions until the ballot-box will be hopelessly debauched, all the approaches thereto corrupt, and all the results therefrom tainted.

I understand perfectly that this is not the largest view of this question to take. The larger interests of this section and of the Union do not rest here. I deplore this fact. I would that the South, fettered by no circumstances and embarrassed by no problem, could take her place by the side of her sister States, making alliance as her interest or patriotism suggested.

Let me say here that I yield to no man in my love for this Union. I was taught from my cradle to love it, and my father, loving it to the last, nevertheless gave his life for Georgia when she asked it at his hands. Loving the Union as he did, yet would I do unto Georgia even as he did. I said once in New York, and I repeat it here, honoring his memory as I do nothing on this earth, I still thank God that the American conflict was adjudged by higher wisdom than his or mine, that the honest purposes of the South were crossed, her brave armies beaten, and the American Union saved from the storm of war. I love this Union because I am an American citizen. I love it because it stands in the light while other nations are groping in the dark. I love it because here, in this republic of a homogeneous people, must be worked out the great problems that perplex the world and established the axioms that must uplift and regenerate humanity. I love it because it is my country, and my State stood by when its flag was once unfurled, and uplifted her stainless sword, and pledged “her life, her property and her sacred honor,” and when the last star glittered from the silken folds, and with her precious blood wrote her loyalty in its crimson 129bars. I love it, because I know that its flag, fluttering from the misty heights of the future, followed by a devoted people once estranged and thereby closer bound, shall blaze out the way, and make clear the path up which all the nations of the earth shall come in God’s appointed time.

I know the ideal status is that every State should vote without regard to sectional lines. The reconciliation of the people will never be complete until Iowa and Georgia, Texas and Massachusetts may stand side by side without surprise. I would to God that status could be reached! If any man can define a path on which the whites of the South, though divided, can walk in honor and peace, I shall take that path, though I walk down it alone—for at the end of that path, and nowhere else, lies the full emancipation of my section and the full restoration of this Union.

But it cannot be. When the negro was enfranchised, the South was condemned to solidity as surely as self-preservation is the first law of nature. A State here or there may drift away, but it will come back assuredly—and come through such travail, and bearing such burden, as neither war nor pestilence can bring. This problem is not of our seeking. It was thrust upon us not in the orderly unfolding of a preordained plan, but in hot impulse and passion, against the judgment of the world and the lessons of history, and to the peril of popular government, which rests at last on a pure and unsullied suffrage as a building rests on its cornerstone. If it be urged that it was the inexorable result of our course in 1860, we reply that we took that course in deliberation, maintained it in sincerity, sealed it with the blood of our best and bravest—and we accept without complaint, and abide in dignity, its direct and ultimate results, and shall hold it to be, in spite of defeat, forever honorable and sacred. This much I add. No king that ever sat on a throne, though backed by autocratic power, would have dared to subject his kingdom to the strain, and his people to the burden that the North put on the prostrate, impoverished, and helpless South when it enfranchised the body 130of our late slaves. We would not undo this if we could. We know that this step, though taken in haste, shall never be retraced. Posterity will judge of the wisdom and patriotism in which it was ordered, and the order and equity in which it was worked out.

To that judgment we appeal with confidence. From that judgment Mr. Blaine has already appealed by shrewdly urging in his written history, that the North did not intend to enfranchise the negro, but was forced to do it by the stubborn attitude of the South. Be that as it may, it is our problem now, and with resolute hands and unfailing hearts we must carry it to the end. It dominates, and will dominate, all other issues with us. Political spoils are not to be considered. The administration of our affairs is secondary, and patronage is less. Economic issues are as naught, and even great moral reforms must wait on the settlement of this question. To quarrel over other issues while this is impending is to imitate the mother quail that thrums the leaves afar from her nest, or recall the finesse of the Spartan boy who smiled in his mother’s face while he hid the fox that was gnawing at his vitals.

What then is the duty of the South? Simply this. To maintain the political as well as the social integrity of her white race, and to appeal to the world for patience and justice. Let us show that it is not sectional prejudice, but a sectional problem that keeps us compacted; that it is not the hope of dominion or power, but an abiding necessity—not spoils or patronage, but plain self-preservation that holds the white race together in the South. Let us make this so plain that a community anywhere, searching its own heart, would say: “The necessity that binds our brothers in the South would bind us as closely were the necessity here.” Let us invite immigrants and meet them with such cordial welcome that they will abide with us in brotherhood, and so enlarge the body of intelligence and integrity, that divided it may carry the burden of ignorance without danger. Let us be loyal to the Union, and not only loyal but loving. Let the republic know that in 131peace it hath nowhere better citizens, nor in war braver soldiers, than in these States. Though set apart by this problem which God permits to rest upon us, and which therefore is right, let us garner our sheaves gladly into the harvest of the Union, and find joy in our work and progress, because it makes broader the glory and deeper the majesty of this republic that is cemented with our blood. Let us love the flag that waved over Marion and Jasper, that waves over us, and which when we are gathered to our fathers shall be a guarantee of liberty and prosperity to our children, and our children’s children, and know that what we do in honor shall deepen, and what we do in dishonor shall dim, the luster of its fixed and glittering stars.

As for the negro, let us impress upon him what he already knows, that his best friends are the people among whom he lives, whose interests are one with his, and whose prosperity depends on his perfect contentment. Let us give him his uttermost rights, and measure out justice to him in that fullness the strong should always give to the weak. Let us educate him that he may be a better, a broader, and more enlightened man. Let us lead him in steadfast ways of citizenship, that he may not longer be the sport of the thoughtless, and the prey of the unscrupulous. Let us inspire him to follow the example of the worthy and upright of his race, who may be found in every community, and who increase steadily in numbers and influence. Let us strike hands with him as friends—and as in slavery we led him to heights which his race in Africa had never reached, so in freedom let us lead him to a prosperity of which his friends in the North have not dreamed. Let us make him know that he, depending more than any other on the protection and bounty of government, shall find in alliance with the best elements of the whites the pledge of safe and impartial administration. And let us remember this—that whatever wrong we put on him shall return to punish us. Whatever we take from him in violence, that is unworthy and shall not endure. What we steal from him in fraud, that is worse. But what we win 132from him in sympathy and affection, what we gain in his confiding alliance and confirm in his awakening judgment, that is precious and shall endure—and out of it shall come healing and peace.

What is the attitude of the North on this issue? Two propositions appear to be universally declared by the Republicans. First, that the negro vote of the South is suppressed by violence, or miscounted by fraud. Second, that it shall be freely cast and fairly counted. While Republicans agree on these declarations, there are those who hold them sincerely, but would be glad to see the first disapproved, and the second thereby wiped out—and those who hold them in malignity, and who will maintain the first that they may justify the storm that lies hid in the second.

Let us send to-day a few words to the fair-minded Republicans of the North. Here is a fundamental assertion—the negroes of the South can never be kept in antagonism with their white neighbors—for the intimacy and friendliness of the relation forbids. This friendliness, the most important factor of the problem—the saving factor now as always—the North has never, and it appears will never, take account of. It explains that otherwise inexplicable thing—the fidelity and loyalty of the negro during the war to the women and children left in his care. Had Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrayed the habit rather than the exception of slavery, the return of the Confederate armies could not have stayed the horrors of arson and murder their departure would have invited. Instead of that, witness the miracle of the slave in loyalty closing the fetters about his own limbs—maintaining the families of those who fought against his freedom—and at night on the far-off battle-field searching among the carnage for his young master, that he might lift the dying head to his humble breast and with rough hands wipe the blood away, and bend his tender ear to catch the last words for the old ones at home, wrestling meanwhile in agony and love, that in vicarious sacrifice he would have laid down his life in his master’s 133stead. This friendliness, thank God, has survived the lapse of years, the interruption of factions, and the violence of campaigns, in which the bayonet fortified, and the drum-beat inspired. Though unsuspected in slavery, it explains the miracle of ’64—though not yet confessed, it must explain the miracle of 1888.

Can a Northern man dealing with casual servants, querulous, sensitive, and lodged for a day in a sphere they resent, understand the close relations of the races of the South? Can he comprehend the open-hearted, sympathetic negro, contented in his place, full of gossip and comradeship, the companion of the hunt, the frolic, the furrow, and the home, standing in kindly dependence that is the habit of his blood, and lifting not his eyes beyond the narrow horizon that shuts him in with his neighbors? This relation may be interrupted, but permanent estrangement can never come between these two races. It is upon this that the South depends. By fair dealing and by sympathy to deepen this friendship and add thereto the moral effect of the better elements compacted, with the wealth and intelligence and influence lodged therein—it is this upon which the South has relied for years, and upon which she will rest in future.

Against this no outside power can prevail. That there has been violence is admitted. There has also been brutality in the North. But I do not believe there was a negro voter in the South kept away from the polls by fear of violence in the late election. I believe there were fewer votes miscounted in the South than in the North. Even in those localities where violence once occurred, wiser counsels have prevailed, and reliance is placed on those higher and legitimate and inexorable methods by which the superior race always dominates, and by which intelligence and integrity always resist the domination of ignorance and corruption. If the honest Republicans of the North permit a scheme of federal supervision, based on the assumption of intimidated voters and a false count, they will blunder from the start, for, beginning in error, they will end in worse. This 134whole matter should be left now with the people, with whom it must be left at last—that people most interested in its honorable settlement. External pressure but irritates and delays. The South has voluntarily laid down the certainty of power which dividing her States would bring, that she might solve this problem in the deliberation and the calmness it demands. She turns away from spoils, knowing that to struggle for them would bring irritation to endanger greater things. She postpones reforms and surrenders economic convictions, that unembarrassed she may deal with this great issue. And she pledges her sacred honor—by all that she has won, and all that she has suffered—that she will settle this problem in such full and exact justice as the finite mind can measure, or finite hands administer. On this pledge she asks the patience and waiting judgment of the world, and especially of the people—her brothers and her kindred—that in passion forced this problem into the keeping of her helpless hands.

Shall she have it?

Let us see. Was there a pistol shot through the South on election day? Was there a riot? Was there anything to equal the disturbance and arrests in President Harrison’s own city? If so, diligent search has not found it. Where then was the vote suppressed through violence? In the 12,000 election precincts of the South, where was a ballot-box rifled, or a registry list altered? Thirteen Republican congressmen were elected, many of them by majorities so slender that the vote of a single precinct would have changed the result. In West Virginia, with its wild and lawless districts, the governorship hangs on less than three hundred votes, and this very day the governor of Tennessee and his cabinet are passing on a legal question in the casting of twenty-three votes that elects or defeats a congressman. In West Virginia and in Tennessee the law will be applied as impartially and the official vote held as sacred as in New York or Ohio. Where, then, is the wholesale fraud of which complaint is made?

In the face of this showing, let me quote from an editorial 135in the Chicago Tribune, one of the most powerful and a usually conservative journal, charging that the negro vote is suppressed and miscounted. It says:

“The trouble is, the blacks will not fight for themselves. White men, or Indians, situated as the negroes, would have made the rivers of the South run red with blood before they would submit to the usurpations and wrongs with which the black passively endure. Oppressed by generations of slavery, the negroes are non-combatants. They will not shoot and burn for their rights.”

Mark the unspeakable infamy of this suggestion. The “trouble” is that the negroes will not rise and shoot and burn. Not the “mercy” is that they do not—but the “mercy” is that they will not massacre and begin the strife that would repeat the horrors of Hayti in the various States of this Republic. Burn and shoot for what? That they may vote in Georgia, where in front of me in the line stood a negro, whose place was as sacred as mine, and whose vote as safely counted? That they may vote in the thirteen districts in which they have elected their congressmen?—in the 320 counties in which they have elected their representatives, and in old Virginia, where they came within 1400 votes of carrying the State?

As the 60,000 Virginia negroes who did vote did so in admitted peace and safety, where was the violence that prevented the needed 1400 from leaving their fields, coming to the ballot-box, and giving the State to the Republicans? And yet slavery itself, in which the selling of a child from its mother’s arms and a wife from her husband was permitted, never brought into reputable print so villainous a suggestion as this, leveled by a knave at a political condition which he views from afar, and which it is proved does not exist. To pass by the man who wrote these words, how shall we judge the temper of a community in which they are applauded? Are these men blood of our blood that they permit such things to go unchallenged? Better that they had refused us parole at Appomattox and had confiscated the ruins of our homes, than twenty years later to bring us under the dominion of 136such passion as this. Hear another witness, General Sherman, not in hot speech but in cold print:

“The negro must be allowed to vote, and his vote must be counted, otherwise, so sure as there is a God in heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions. Should the negro strike that blow, in seeming justice, there will be millions to assist them.”

And this is the greatest living soldier of the Union army. He covered the desolation he sowed in city and country through these States with the maxim that “cruelty in war, is mercy”—and no one lifted the cloak. But when he insults the men he conquered, and endangers the renewing growth of the country he wasted, with this unmanly threat, he puts a stain on his name the maxims of philosophy and fable from Socrates all the way cannot cover, and the glory of Marlborough, were it added to his own, could not efface.

No answer can be made in passion to these men. If the temper of the North is expressed in their words, the South can do nothing but rally her sons for their last defense and await in silence what the future may bring forth. This much should be said: The negro can never be established in dominion over the white race of the South. The sword of Grant and the bayonets of his army could not maintain them in the supremacy they had won from the helplessness of our people. No sword drawn by mortal man, no army martialed by mortal hand, can replace them in the supremacy from which they were cast down by our people, for the Lord God Almighty decreed otherwise when he created these races, and the flaming sword of his archangel will enforce his decree and work out his plan of unchangeable wisdom.

I do not believe the people of the North will be committed to a violent policy. I believe in the good faith and fair play of the American people. These noisy insects of the hour will perish with the heat that warmed them into life, and when their pestilent cries have ceased, the 137great clock of the Republic will strike the slow-moving and tranquil hours, and the watchmen from the streets will cry, “All’s well—all’s well!” I thank God that through the mists of passion that already cloud our northern horizon comes the clear, strong voice of President Harrison declaring that the South shall not suffer, but shall prosper, in his election. Happy will it be for us—happy for this country, and happy for his name and fame, if he has the courage to withstand the demagogues who clamor for our crucifixion, and the wisdom to establish a path in which voters of all parties and of all sections may walk together in peace and prosperity.

Should the President yield to the demands of the pestilent, the country will appeal from his decision. In Indiana and New York more than two million votes were cast. By less than 16,000 majority these States were given to Harrison, and his election thereby secured. A change of less than ten thousand in this enormous poll would restore the Democratic party to power. If President Harrison permits this unrighteous crusade on the peace of the South, and the prosperity of the people, this change and more will be made, and the Democratic party restored to power.

In her industrial growth the South is daily making new friends. Every dollar of Northern money invested in the South gives us a new friend in that section. Every settler among us raises up new witnesses to our fairness, sincerity and loyalty. We shall secure from the North more friendliness and sympathy, more champions and friends, through the influence of our industrial growth, than through political aspiration or achievement. Few men can comprehend—would that I had the time to dwell on this point to-day—how vast has been the development, how swift the growth, and how deep and enduring is laid the basis of even greater growth in the future. Companies of immigrants sent down from the sturdy settlers of the North will solve the Southern problem, and bring this section into full and harmonious relations with the North quicker than all the battalions that could be armed and martialed could do.

138The tide of immigration is already springing this way. Let us encourage it. But let us see that these immigrants come in well-ordered procession, and not pell-mell. That they come as friends and neighbors—to mingle their blood with ours, to build their homes on our fields, to plant their Christian faith on these red hills, and not seeking to plant strange heresies of government and faith, but, honoring our constitution and reverencing our God, to confirm, and not estrange, the simple faith in which we have been reared, and which we should transmit unsullied to our children.

It may be that the last hope of saving the old-fashioned on this continent will be lodged in the South. Strange admixtures have brought strange results in the North. The anarchist and atheist walk abroad in the cities, and, defying government, deny God. Culture has refined for itself new and strange religions from the strong old creeds.

The old-time South is fading from observance, and the mellow church-bells that called the people to the temples of God are being tabooed and silenced. Let us, my countrymen, here to-day—yet a homogeneous and God-fearing people—let us highly resolve that we will carry untainted the straight and simple faith—that we will give ourselves to the saving of the old-fashioned, that we will wear in our hearts the prayers we learned at our mother’s knee, and seek no better faith than that which fortified her life through adversity, and led her serene and smiling through the valley of the shadow.

Let us keep sacred the Sabbath of God in its purity, and have no city so great, or village so small, that every Sunday morning shall not stream forth over towns and meadows the golden benediction of the bells, as they summon the people to the churches of their fathers, and ring out in praise of God and the power of His might. Though other people are led into the bitterness of unbelief, or into the stagnation of apathy and neglect—let us keep these two States in the current of the sweet old-fashioned, that the sweet rushing waters may lap their sides, and everywhere from their soil grow the tree, the leaf whereof shall not 139fade and the fruit whereof shall not die, but the fruit whereof shall be meat, and the leaf whereof shall be healing.

In working out our civil, political, and religious salvation, everything depends on the union of our people. The man who seeks to divide them now in the hour of their trial, that man puts ambition before patriotism. A distinguished gentleman said that “certain upstarts and speculators were seeking to create a new South to the derision and disparagement of the old,” and rebukes them for so doing. These are cruel and unjust words. It was Ben Hill—the music of whose voice hath not deepened, though now attuned to the symphonies of the skies—who said: “There was a South of secession and slavery—that South is dead; there is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, growing, every hour.”

It was he who named the New South. One of the “upstarts” said in a speech in New York: “In answering the toast to the New South, I accept that name in no disparagement to the Old South. Dear to me, sir, is the home of my childhood and the traditions of my people, and not for the glories of New England history from Plymouth Rock all the way, would I surrender the least of these. Never shall I do, or say, aught to dim the luster of the glory of my ancestors, won in peace and war.”

Where is the young man in the South who has spoken one word in disparagement of our past, or has worn lightly the sacred traditions of our fathers? The world has not equaled the unquestioning reverence and undying loyalty of the young man of the South to the memory of our fathers. History has not equaled the cheerfulness and heroism with which they bestirred themselves amid the poverty that was their legacy, and holding the inspiration of their past to be better than rich acres and garnered wealth, went out to do their part in rebuilding the fallen fortunes of the South and restoring her fields to their pristine beauty. Wherever they have driven—in marketplace, putting youth against experience, poverty against capital—in the shop earning in the light of their forges 140and the sweat of their faces the bread and meat for those dependent upon them—in the forum, eloquent by instinct, able though unlettered—on the farm, locking the sunshine in their harvests and spreading the showers on their fields—everywhere my heart has been with them, and I thank God that they are comrades and countrymen of mine. I have stood with them shoulder to shoulder as they met new conditions without surrendering old faiths—and I have been content to feel the grasp of their hands and the throb of their hearts, and hear the music of their quick step as they marched unfearing into new and untried ways. If I should attempt to prostitute the generous enthusiasm of these my comrades to my own ambition, I should be unworthy. If any man enwrapping himself in the sacred memories of the Old South, should prostitute them to the hiding of his weakness, or the strengthening of his failing fortunes, that man would be unworthy. If any man for his own advantage should seek to divide the old South from the new, or the new from the old—to separate these that in love hath been joined together—to estrange the son from his father’s grave and turn our children from the monuments of our dead, to embitter the closing days of our veterans with suspicion of the sons who shall follow them—this man’s words are unworthy and are spoken to the injury of his people.

Some one has said in derision that the old men of the South, sitting down amid their ruins, reminded him “of the Spanish hidalgos sitting in the porches of the Alhambra, and looking out to sea for the return of the lost Armada.” There is pathos but no derision in this picture to me. These men were our fathers. Their lives were stainless. Their hands were daintily cast, and the civilization they builded in tender and engaging grace hath not been equaled. The scenes amid which they moved, as princes among men, have vanished forever. A grosser and material day has come, in which their gentle hands could garner but scantily, and their guileless hearts fend but feebly. Let them sit, therefore, in the dismantled porches of their homes, into which dishonor hath never entered, to which 141discourtesy is a stranger—and gaze out to the sea, beyond the horizon of which their armada has drifted forever. And though the sea shall not render back for them the Arguses that went down in their ship, let us build for them in the land they love so well a stately and enduring temple—its pillars founded in justice, its arches springing to the skies, its treasuries filled with substance; liberty walking in its corridors; art adorning its walls; religion filling its aisles with incense,—and here let them rest in honorable peace and tranquillity until God shall call them hence to “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

There are other things I wish to say to you to-day, my countrymen, but my voice forbids. I thank you for your courteous and patient attention. And I pray to God—who hath led us through sorrow and travail—that on this day of universal thanksgiving, when every Christian heart in this audience is uplifted in praise, that He will open the gates of His glory and bend down above us in mercy and love! And that these people who have given themselves unto Him, and who wear His faith in their hearts, that He will lead them even as little children are led—that He will deepen their wisdom with the ambition of His words—that He will turn them from error with the touch of His almighty hand—that he will crown all their triumphs with the light of His approving smile, and into the heart of their troubles, whether of people or state, that He will pour the healing of His mercy and His grace.

ADDRESS delivered before the Societies of the University of Virginia, June 25, 1889.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: In thanking you for this cordial—this Virginia—welcome, let me say that it satisfies my heart to be with you to-day. This is my alma mater. Kind, in the tolerant patience with which she winnowed the chaff of idle days and idler nights that she might find for me the grain of knowledge and of truth, and in the charity with which she sealed in sorrow rather than in anger my brief but stormy career within these walls. Kinder yet, that her old heart has turned lovingly after the lapse of twenty years to her scapegrace son in a distant State, and recalling him with this honorable commission, has summoned him to her old place at her knees. Here at her feet, with the glory of her presence breaking all about me, let me testify that the years have but deepened my reverence and my love, and my heart has owned the magical tenderness of the emotions first kindled amid these sacred scenes. That which was unworthy has faded—that which was good has abided. Faded the memory of the tempestuous dyke and the riotous kalathump—dimmed the memory of that society, now happily extinct, but then famous as “The Nippers from Peru”—forgotten even the glad exultation of those days when the neighboring mountaineer in the pride of his breezy heights brought down the bandaged bear to give battle to the urban dog. Forgotten all these follies, and let us hope forgiven. But, 143enduring in heart and in brain, the exhaustless splendor of those golden days—the deep and pure inspiration of these academic shades—the kindly admonition and wisdom of the masters—the generous ardor of our mimic contests—and that loving comradeship that laughed at separation and has lived beyond the grave. Enduring and hallowed, blessed be God, the strange and wild ambitions that startled my boyish heart as amid these dim corridors, oh! my mother, the stirring of unseen wings in thy mighty past caught my careless ear, and the dazzling ideals of thy future were revealed to my wondering sight.

Gentlemen of the literary societies—I have no studied oration for you to-day. A life busy beyond its capacities has given scanty time for preparation. But from a loving heart I shall speak to you this morning in comradely sympathy of that which concerns us nearly.

Will you allow me to say that the anxiety that always possesses me when I address my young countrymen is to-day quickened to the point of consecration. For the first time in man’s responsibility I speak in Virginia to Virginia. Beyond its ancient glories that made it matchless among States, its later martyrdom has made it the Mecca of my people. It was on these hills that our fathers gave new and deeper meaning to heroism, and advanced the world in honor! It is in these valleys that our dead lie sleeping. Out there is Appomattox, where on every ragged gray cap the Lord God Almighty laid the sword of His imperishable knighthood. Beyond is Petersburg, where he whose name I bear, and who was prince to me among men, dropped his stainless sword and yielded up his stainless life. Dear to me, sir, are the people among whom my father died—sacred to me, sir, the soil that drank his precious blood. From a heart stirred by these emotions and sobered by these memories, let me speak to you to-day, my countrymen—and God give me wisdom to speak aright and the words wherewithal to challenge and hold your attention.

We are standing in the daybreak of the second century 144of this Republic. The fixed stars are fading from the sky, and we grope in uncertain light. Strange shapes have come with the night. Established ways are lost—new roads perplex, and widening fields stretch beyond the sight. The unrest of dawn impels us to and fro—but Doubt stalks amid the confusion, and even on the beaten paths the shifting crowds are halted, and from the shadows the sentries cry: “Who comes there?” In the obscurity of the morning tremendous forces are at work. Nothing is steadfast or approved. The miracles of the present belie the simple truths of the past. The church is besieged from without and betrayed from within. Behind the courts smoulders the rioter’s torch and looms the gibbet of the anarchists. Government is the contention of partisans and the prey of spoilsmen. Trade is restless in the grasp of monopoly, and commerce shackled with limitation. The cities are swollen and the fields are stripped. Splendor streams from the castle, and squalor crouches in the home. The universal brotherhood is dissolving, and the people are huddling into classes. The hiss of the Nihilist disturbs the covert, and the roar of the mob murmurs along the highway. Amid it all beats the great American heart undismayed, and standing fast by the challenge of his conscience, the citizen of the Republic, tranquil and resolute, notes the drifting of the spectral currents, and calmly awaits the full disclosures of the day.

Who shall be the heralds of this coming day? Who shall thread the way of honor and safety through these besetting problems? Who shall rally the people to the defense of their liberties and stir them until they shall cry aloud to be led against the enemies of the Republic? You, my countrymen, you! The university is the training camp of the future. The scholar the champion of the coming years. Napoleon over-ran Europe with drum-tap and bivouac—the next Napoleon shall form his battalions at the tap of the schoolhouse bell and his captains shall come with cap and gown. Waterloo was won at Oxford—Sedan at Berlin. So Germany plants her colleges in the shadow 145of the French forts, and the professor smiles amid his students as he notes the sentinel stalking against the sky. The farmer has learned that brains mix better with his soil than the waste of seabirds, and the professor walks by his side as he spreads the showers in the verdure of his field, and locks the sunshine in the glory of his harvest. A button is pressed by a child’s finger and the work of a million men is done. The hand is nothing—the brain everything. Physical prowess has had its day and the age of reason has come. The lion-hearted Richard challenging Saladin to single combat is absurd, for even Gog and Magog shall wage the Armageddon from their closets and look not upon the blood that runs to the bridle-bit. Science is everything! She butchers a hog in Chicago, draws Boston within three hours of New York, renews the famished soil, routs her viewless bondsmen from the electric center of the earth, and then turns to watch the new Icarus as mounting in his flight to the sun he darkens the burnished ceiling of the sky with the shadow of his wing.

Learning is supreme and you are its prophets. Here the Olympic games of the Republic—and you its chosen athletes. It is yours then to grapple with these problems, to confront and master these dangers. Yours to decide whether the tremendous forces of this Republic shall be kept in balance, or whether unbalanced they shall bring chaos; whether 60,000,000 men are capable of self-government, or whether liberty shall be lost to them who would give their lives to maintain it. Your responsibility is appalling. You stand in the pass behind which the world’s liberties are guarded. This government carries the hopes of the human race. Blot out the beacon that lights the portals of this Republic and the world is adrift again. But save the Republic; establish the light of its beacon over the troubled waters, and one by one the nations of the earth shall drop anchor and be at rest in the harbor of universal liberty. Let one who loves this Republic as he loves his life, and whose heart is thrilled with the majesty of its mission, speak to you now of the dangers that 146threaten its peace and prosperity, and the means by which they may be honorably averted.

The unmistakable danger that threatens free government in America, is the increasing tendency to concentrate in the Federal government powers and privileges that should be left with the States, and to create powers that neither the State nor Federal government should have. Let it be understood at once that in discussing this question I seek to revive no dead issue. We know precisely what was put to the issue of the sword, and what was settled thereby. The right of a State to leave this Union was denied and the denial made good forever. But the sovereignty of the States in the Union was never involved, and the Republic that survived the storm was, in the words of the Supreme Court, “an indissoluble Union of indestructible States.” Let us stand on this decree and turn our faces to the future!

It is not strange that there should be a tendency to centralization in our government. This disposition was the legacy of the war. Steam and electricity have emphasized it by bringing the people closer together. The splendor of a central government dazzles the unthinking—its opulence tempts the poor and the avaricious—its strength assures the rich and the timid—its patronage incites the spoilsmen and its powers inflame the partisan.

And so we have paternalism run mad. The merchant asks the government to control the arteries of trade—the manufacturer asks that his product be protected—the rich asks for an army, and the unfortunate for help—this man for schools and that for subsidy. The partisan proclaims, amid the clamor, that the source of largess must be the seat of power, and demands that the ballot-boxes of the States be hedged by Federal bayonets. The centrifugal force of our system is weakened, the centripetal force is increased, and the revolving spheres are veering inward from their orbits. There are strong men who rejoice in this unbalancing and deliberately contend that the center is the true repository of power and source of privilege—men who, were they charged with the solar system, would shred the planets 147into the sun, and, exulting in the sudden splendor, little reck that they had kindled the conflagration that presages universal nights! Thus the States are dwarfed and the nation magnified—and to govern a people, who can best govern themselves, the central authority is made stronger and more splendid!

Concurrent with this political drift is another movement, less formal perhaps, but not less dangerous—the consolidation of capital. I hesitate to discuss this phase of the subject, for of all men I despise most cordially the demagogue who panders to the prejudice of the poor by abuse of the rich. But no man can note the encroachment in this country of what may be called “the money power” on the rights of the individual, without feeling that the time is approaching when the issue between plutocracy and the people will be forced to trial. The world has not seen, nor has the mind of man conceived of such miraculous wealth-gathering as are every-day tales to us. Aladdin’s lamp is dimmed, and Monte Cristo becomes commonplace when compared to our magicians of finance and trade. The seeds of a luxury that even now surpasses that of Rome or Corinth, and has only yet put forth its first flowers, are sown in this simple republic. What shall the full fruitage be? I do not denounce the newly rich. For most part their money came under forms of law. The irresponsibilities of sudden wealth is in many cases steadied by that resolute good sense which seems to be an American heritage, and under-run by careless prodigality or by constant charity. Our great wealth has brought us profit and splendor. But the status itself is a menace. A home that costs $3,000,000 and a breakfast that cost $5000 are disquieting facts to the millions who live in a hut and dine on a crust. The fact that a man ten years from poverty has an income of $20,000,000—and his two associates nearly as much—from the control and arbitrary pricing of an article of universal use, falls strangely on the ears of those who hear it, as they sit empty-handed, while children cry for bread. The tendency deepens the dangers suggested 148by the status. What is to be the end of this swift piling up of wealth? Twenty years ago but few cities had their millionaires. To-day almost every town has its dozen. Twenty men can be named who can each buy a sovereign State at its tax-book value. The youngest nation, America, is vastly the richest, and in twenty years, in spite of war, has nearly trebled her wealth. Millions are made on the turn of a trade, and the toppling mass grows and grows, while in its shadow starvation and despair stalk among the people, and swarm with increasing legions against the citadels of human life.

But the abuse of this amazing power of consolidated wealth is its bitterest result and its pressing danger. When the agent of a dozen men, who have captured and control an article of prime necessity, meets the representatives of a million farmers from whom they have forced $3,000,000 the year before, with no more moral right than is behind the highwayman who halts the traveler at his pistol’s point, and insolently gives them the measure of this year’s rapacity, and tells them—men who live in the sweat of their brows, and stand between God and Nature—that they must submit to the infamy because they are helpless, then the first fruits of this system are gathered and have turned to ashes on the lips. When a dozen men get together in the morning and fix the price of a dozen articles of common use—with no standard but their arbitrary will, and no limit but their greed or daring—and then notify the sovereign people of this free Republic how much, in the mercy of their masters, they shall pay for the necessaries of life—then the point of intolerable shame has been reached.

We have read of the robber barons of the Rhine who from their castles sent a shot across the bow of every passing craft, and descending as hawks from the crags, tore and robbed and plundered the voyagers until their greed was glutted, or the strength of their victims spent. Shall this shame of Europe against which the world revolted, shall it be repeated in this free country? And yet, when a 149syndicate or a trust can arbitrarily add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of a single article of common use, and safely gather forced tribute from the people, until from its surplus it could buy every castle on the Rhine, or requite every baron’s debauchery from its kitchen account—where is the difference—save that the castle is changed to a broker’s office, and the picturesque river to the teeming streets and the broad fields of this government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”? I do not overstate the case. Economists have held that wheat, grown everywhere, could never be cornered by capital. And yet one man in Chicago tied the wheat crop in his handkerchief, and held it until a sewing-woman in my city, working for ninety cents a week, had to pay him twenty cents tax on the sack of flour she bore home in her famished hands. Three men held the cotton crop until the English spindles were stopped and the lights went out in 3,000,000 English homes. Last summer one man cornered pork until he had levied a tax of $3 per barrel on every consumer, and pocketed a profit of millions. The Czar of Russia would not have dared to do these things. And yet they are no secrets in this free government of ours! They are known of all men, and, my countrymen, no argument can follow them, and no plea excuse them, when they fall on the men who toiling, yet suffer—who hunger at their work—and who cannot find food for their wives with which to feed the infants that hang famishing at their breasts. Mr. Jefferson foresaw this danger and he sought to avert it. When Virginia ceded the vast Northwest to the government—before the Constitution was written—Mr. Jefferson in the second clause of the articles of cession prohibited forever the right of primogeniture. Virginia then nobly said, and Georgia in the cession of her territory repeated: “In granting this domain to the government and dedicating it to freedom, we prescribe that there shall be no classes in the family—no child set up at the expense of the others, no feudal estates established—but what a man hath shall be divided equally among his children.”

150We see this feudal tendency, swept away by Mr. Jefferson, revived by the conditions of our time, aided by the government with its grant of enormous powers and its amazing class legislation. It has given the corporation more power than Mr. Jefferson stripped from the individual, and has set up a creature without soul or conscience or limit of human life to establish an oligarchy, unrelieved by human charity and unsteadied by human responsibility. The syndicate, the trust, the corporation—these are the eldest sons of the Republic for whom the feudal right of primogeniture is revived, and who inherit its estate to the impoverishment of their brothers. Let it be noted that the alliance between those who would centralize the government and the consolidated money power is not only close but essential. The one is the necessity of the other. Establish the money power and there is universal clamor for strong government. The weak will demand it for protection against the people restless under oppression—the patriotic for protection against the plutocracy that scourges and robs—the corrupt hoping to buy of one central body distant from local influences what they could not buy from the legislatures of the States sitting at their homes—the oligarchs will demand it—as the privileged few have always demanded it—for the protection of their privileges and the perpetuity of their bounty. Thus, hand in hand, will walk—as they have always walked—the federalist and the capitalist, the centralist and the monopolist—the strong government protecting the money power, and the money power the political standing army of the government. Hand in hand, compact and organized, one creating the necessity, the other meeting it; consolidated wealth and centralizing government; stripping the many of their rights and aggrandizing the few; distrusting the people but in touch with the plutocrats; striking down local self-government and dwarfing the citizens—and at last confronting the people in the market, in the courts, at the ballot box—everywhere—with the infamous challenge: “What are you going 151to do about it?” And so the government protects and the barons oppress, and the people suffer and grow strong. And when the battle for liberty is joined—the centralist and the plutocrat, entrenched behind the deepening powers of the government, and the countless ramparts of money bags, oppose to the vague but earnest onset of the people the power of the trained phalanx and the conscienceless strength of the mercenary.

Against this tendency who shall protest? Those who believe that a central government means a strong government, and a strong government means repression—those who believe that this vast Republic, with its diverse interests and its local needs, can better be governed by liberty and enlightenment diffused among the people than by powers and privileges congested at the center—those who believe that the States should do nothing that the people can do themselves and the government nothing that the States and the people can do—those who believe that the wealth of the central government is a crime rather than a virtue, and that every dollar not needed for its economical administration should be left with the people of the States—those who believe that the hearthstone of the home is the true altar of liberty and the enlightened conscience of the citizen the best guarantee of government! Those of you who note the farmer sending his sons to the city that they may escape the unequal burdens under which he has labored, thus diminishing the rural population whose leisure, integrity and deliberation have corrected the passion and impulse and corruption of the cities—who note that while the rich are growing richer, and the poor poorer, we are lessening that great middle class that, ever since it met the returning crusaders in England with the demand that the hut of the humble should be as sacred as the castle of the great, has been the bulwark and glory of every English-speaking community—who know that this Republic, which we shall live to see with 150,000,000 people, stretching from ocean to ocean, and almost from the arctic to the torrid zone, cannot be governed by any laws that a 152central despotism could devise or controlled by any armies it could marshal—you who know these things protest with all the earnestness of your souls against the policy and the methods that make them possible.

What is the remedy? To exalt the hearthstone—to strengthen the home—to build up the individual—to magnify and defend the principle of local self-government. Not in deprecation of the Federal government, but to its glory—not to weaken the Republic, but to strengthen it—not to check the rich blood that flows to its heart, but to send it full and wholesome from healthy members rather than from withered and diseased extremities.

The man who kindles the fire on the hearthstone of an honest and righteous home burns the best incense to liberty. He does not love mankind less who loves his neighbor most. George Eliot has said:

“A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and spread, not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blest.”

The germ of the best patriotism is in the love that a man has for the home he inhabits, for the soil he tills, for the trees that gives him shade, and the hills that stand in his pathway. I teach my son to love Georgia—to love the soil that he stands on—the body of my old mother—the mountains that are her springing breasts, the broad acres that hold her substance, the dimpling valleys in which her beauty rests, the forests that sing her songs of lullaby and of praise, and the brooks that run with her rippling laughter. The love of home—deep rooted and abiding—that blurs the eyes of the dying soldier with the vision of an old homestead amid green fields and clustering trees—that follows the busy man through the clamoring world, persistent though put aside, and at last draws his tired feet from the highway and leads him through shady lanes and well-remembered paths until, amid the scenes of his boyhood, he gathers up the broken threads of his life and owns the 153soil his conqueror—this—this lodged in the heart of the citizen is the saving principle of our government. We note the barracks of our standing army with its rolling drum and its fluttering flag as points of strength and protection. But the citizen standing in the doorway of his home—contented on his threshold—his family gathered about his hearthstone—while the evening of a well-spent day closes in scenes and sounds that are dearest—he shall save the Republic when the drum tap is futile and the barracks are exhausted.

This love shall not be pent up or provincial. The home should be consecrated to humanity, and from its roof-tree should fly the flag of the Republic. Every simple fruit gathered there—every sacrifice endured, and every victory won, should bring better joy and inspiration in the knowledge that it will deepen the glory of our Republic and widen the harvest of humanity! Be not like the peasant of France who hates the Paris he cannot comprehend—but emulate the example of your fathers in the South, who, holding to the sovereignty of the States, yet gave to the Republic its chief glory of statesmanship, and under Jackson at New Orleans, and Taylor and Scott in Mexico, saved it twice from the storm of war. Inherit without fear or shame the principle of local self-government by which your fathers stood! For though entangled with an institution foreign to this soil, which, thank God, not planted by their hands, is now swept away, and with a theory bravely defended but now happily adjusted—that principle holds the imperishable truth that shall yet save this Republic. The integrity of the State, its rights and its powers—these, maintained with firmness, but in loyalty—these shall yet, by lodging the option of local affairs in each locality, meet the needs of this vast and complex government, and check the headlong rush to that despotism that reason could not defend, nor the armies of the Czar maintain, among a free and enlightened people. This issue is squarely made! It is centralized government and the money power on the one hand—against the integrity of the States and rights of 154the people on the other. At all hazard, stand with the people and the threatened States. The choice may not be easily made. Wise men may hesitate and patriotic men divide. The culture, the strength, the mightiness of the rich and strong government—these will tempt and dazzle. But be not misled. Beneath this splendor is the canker of a disturbed and oppressed people. It was from the golden age of Augustus that the Roman empire staggered to its fall. The integrity of the States and the rights of the people! Stand there—there is safety—there is the broad and enduring brotherhood—there, less of glory, but more of honor! Put patriotism above partisanship—and wherever the principle that protects the States against the centralists, and the people against the plutocrats, may lead, follow without fear or faltering—for there the way of duty and of wisdom lies!

Exalt the citizen. As the State is the unit of government he is the unit of the State. Teach him that his home is his castle, and his sovereignty rests beneath his hat. Make himself self-respecting, self-reliant and responsible. Let him lean on the State for nothing that his own arm can do, and on the government for nothing that his State can do. Let him cultivate independence to the point of sacrifice, and learn that humble things with unbartered liberty are better than splendors bought with its price. Let him neither surrender his individuality to government, nor merge it with the mob. Let him stand upright and fearless—a freeman born of freemen—sturdy in his own strength—dowering his family in the sweat of his brow—loving to his State—loyal to his Republic—earnest in his allegiance wherever it rests, but building his altar in the midst of his household gods and shrining in his own heart the uttermost temple of its liberty.

Go out, determined to magnify the community in which your lot is cast. Cultivate its small economies. Stand by its young industries. Commercial dependence is a chain that galls every day. A factory built at home, a book published, a shoe or a book made, these are steps in that 155diffusion of thought and interest that is needed. Teach your neighbors to withdraw from the vassalage of distant capitalists, and pay, under any sacrifice, the mortgage on the home or the land. By simple and prudent lives stay within your own resources, and establish the freedom of your community. Make every village and cross-roads as far as may be sovereign to its own wants. Learn that thriving country-sides with room for limbs, conscience, and liberty are better than great cities with congested wealth and population. Preserve the straight and simple homogeneity of our people. Welcome emigrants, but see that they come as friends and neighbors, to mingle their blood with ours, to build their houses in our fields, and to plant their Christian faith on our hills, and honoring our constitution and reverencing our God, to confirm the simple beliefs in which we have been reared, and which we should transmit unsullied to our children. Stand by these old-fashioned beliefs. Science hath revealed no better faith than that you learned at your mother’s knee—nor has knowledge made a wiser and a better book than the worn old Bible that, thumbed by hands long since still, and blurred with the tears of eyes long since closed, held the simple annals of your family and the heart and conscience of your homes.

Honor and emulate the virtues and the faith of your forefathers—who, learned, were never wise above a knowledge of God and His gospel—who, great, were never exalted above an humble trust in God and His mercy!

Let me sum up what I have sought to say in this hurried address. Your Republic—on the glory of which depends all that men hold dear—is menaced with great dangers. Against these dangers defend her, as you would defend the most precious concerns of your own life. Against the dangers of centralizing all political powers, put the approved and imperishable principle of local self-government. Between the rich and the poor now drifting into separate camps, build up the great middle class that, neither drunk with wealth, nor embittered by poverty, 156shall lift up the suffering and control the strong. To the jangling of races and creeds that threaten the courts of men and the temples of God, oppose the home and the citizen—a homogeneous and honest people—and the simple faith that sustained your fathers and mothers in their stainless lives and led them serene and smiling into the valley of the shadow.

Let it be understood in my parting words to you that I am no pessimist as to this Republic. I always bet on sunshine in America. I know that my country has reached the point of perilous greatness, and that strange forces not to be measured or comprehended are hurrying her to heights that dazzle and blind all mortal eyes—but I know that beyond the uttermost glory is enthroned the Lord God Almighty, and that when the hour of her trial has come He will lift up His everlasting gates and bend down above her in mercy and in love. For with her He has surely lodged the ark of His covenant with the sons of men. Emerson wisely said, “Our whole history looks like the last effort by Divine Providence in behalf of the human race.” And the Republic will endure. Centralism will be checked, and liberty saved—plutocracy overthrown and equality restored. The struggle for human rights never goes backward among English-speaking peoples. Our brothers across the sea have fought from despotism to liberty, and in the wisdom of local self-government have planted colonies around the world. This very day Mr. Gladstone, the wisest man that has lived since your Jefferson died—with the light of another world beating in his face until he seems to have caught the wisdom of the Infinite and towers half human and half divine from his eminence—this man, turning away from the traditions of his life, begs his countrymen to strip the crown of its last usurped authority, and lodge it with the people, where it belongs. The trend of the times is with us. The world moves steadily from gloom to brightness. And bending down humbly as Elisha did, and praying that my eyes shall be made to see, I catch the vision of this Republic—its 157mighty forces in balance, and its unspeakable glory falling on all its children—chief among the federation of English-speaking people—plenty streaming from its borders, and light from its mountain tops—working out its mission under God’s approving eye, until the dark continents are opened—and the highways of earth established, and the shadows lifted—and the jargon of the nations stilled and the perplexities of Babel straightened—and under one language, one liberty, and one God, all the nations of the world hearkening to the American drum-beat and girding up their loins, shall march amid the breaking of the millennial dawn into the paths of righteousness and of peace!

MR. Grady’s Speech at Elberton, Georgia, in June, 1889.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:—For the first time in my life I address an audience in the open air. And as I stand here in this beautiful morning, so shot through and through with sunshine that the very air is as molten gold to the touch—under these trees in whose trunks the rains and suns of years are compacted, and on whose leaves God has laid His whispering music—here in His majestic temple, with the brightness of His smile breaking all about us—standing above the soil instinct with the touch of His life-giving hand, and full of His promise and His miracle—and looking up to the clouds through which His thunders roll, and His lightnings cut their way, and beyond that to the dazzling glory of the sun, and yet beyond to the unspeakable splendor of the universe, flashing and paling until the separate stars are but as mist in the skies—even to the uplifted jasper gates through which His everlasting glory streams, my mind falls back abashed, and I realize how paltry is human speech, and how idle are the thoughts of men!

Another thought oppresses me. In front of me sit several thousand people. Over there, in smelling distance, where we can almost hear the lisping of the mop as it caresses the barbecued lamb or the pottering of the skewered pig as he leisurely turns from fat to crackling, 159is being prepared a dinner that I verily believe covers more provisions than were issued to all the soldiers of Lee’s army, God bless them, in their last campaign. And I shudder when I think that I, a single, unarmed, defenseless man, is all that stands between this crowd and that dinner. Here then, awed by God’s majesty, and menaced by man’s appetite, I am tempted to leave this platform and yield to the boyish impulses that always stir in my heart amid such scenes, and revert to the days of boyhood when about the hills of Athens I chased the pacing coon, or twisted the unwary rabbit, or shot my ramrod at all manner of birds and beasts—and at night went home to look up into a pair of gentle eyes and take on my tired face the benediction of a mother’s kiss and feel on my weary head a pair of loving hands, now wrinkled and trembling, but, blessed be God, fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal women, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man, as they laid a mother’s blessing there, while bending at her knees I made my best confession of faith and worshiped at the truest altar I have yet found in this world. I had rather go out and lay down on the ground and hug the grass to my breast and mind me of the time when I builded boyish ambitions on the wooded hills of Athens, than do aught else to-day. But I recall the story of Uncle Remus, who when his favorite hero, Brer Rabbit, was sorely pressed by that arch villain, Brer Fox, said:

“An’ Brer Rabbit den he climb’d a tree.” “But,” said the little boy, “Uncle Remus, a rabbit can’t climb a tree.”

“Doan you min’ dat, honey. Brer Fox pressed dis rabbit so hard he des bleeged to clim’ a tree.”

I am pressed so hard to-day by your commands that I am just “bleeged” to make a speech, and so I proceed. I heartily invoke God’s guidance in what I say, that I shall utter no word to soil this temple of His, and no sentiment not approved in His wisdom; and as for you, when the time comes—as it will come—when you prefer barbecued shote to raw orator, and feel that you can be happier 160at that table than in this forum, just say the word and I will be with you heart and soul!

I am tempted to yield to the gaiety of this scene, to the flaunting banners of the trees, the downpouring sunshine, the garnered plenty over there, this smiling and hospitable crowd, and, throwing serious affairs aside, to speak to you to-day as the bird sings—without care and without thought. I should be false to myself and to you if I did, for there are serious problems that beset our State and our country that no man, facing, as I do this morning, a great and intelligent audience, can in honor or in courage disregard. I shall attempt to make no brilliant speech—but to counsel with you in plain and simple words, beseeching your attention and your sympathy as to the dangers of the present hour, and our duties and our responsibilities.

At Saturday noon in any part of this county you may note the farmer going from his field, eating his dinner thoughtfully and then saddling his plow-horse, or starting afoot and making his way to a neighboring church or schoolhouse. There he finds from every farm, through every foot-path, his neighbors gathering to meet him. What is the object of this meeting? It is not social, it is not frolic, it is not a pic-nic—the earnest, thoughtful faces, the serious debate and council, the closed doors and the secret session forbid this assumption. It is a meeting of men who feel that in spite of themselves their affairs are going wrong—of free and equal citizens who feel that they carry unequal burdens—of toilers who feel that they reap not the just fruits of their toil—of men who feel that their labor enriches others while it leaves them poor, and that the sweat of their bodies, shed freely under God’s command, goes to clothe the idle and the avaricious in purple and fine linen. This is a meeting of protest, of resistance. Here the farmer meets to demand, and organize that he may enforce his demand, that he shall stand equal with every other class of citizens—that laws discriminating against him shall be repealed—that the methods oppressing him shall be modified or abolished—and that he shall be guaranteed 161that neither government nor society shall abridge, by statute or custom, his just and honest proportion of the wealth he created, but that he shall be permitted to garner in his barns, and enjoy by his hearthstone, the full and fair fruits of his labor. If this movement were confined to Elbert, if this disturbing feeling of discontent were shut in the limits of your county lines, it would still demand the attention of the thoughtful and patriotic. But, as it is in Elbert, so it is in every county in Georgia—as in Georgia, so it is in every State in the South—as in the South, so in every agricultural State in the Union. In every rural neighborhood, from Ohio to Texas, from Michigan to Georgia, the farmers, riding thoughtful through field and meadow, seek ten thousand schoolhouses or churches—the muster grounds of this new army—and there, recounting their wrongs and renewing their pledges, send up from neighborhoods to county, from county to State, and State to Republic, the measure of their strength and the unyielding quality of their determination. The agricultural army of the Republic is in motion. The rallying drumbeat has rolled over field and meadow, and from where the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf, and the clover carpets the earth, and the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains—everywhere that patient man stands above the soil, or bends about the furrow, the farmers are ready in squads and companies and battalions and legions to be led against what they hold to be an oppression that honest men would not deserve, and that brave men would not endure. Let us not fail to comprehend the magnitude and the meaning of this movement. It is no trifling cause that brings the farmers into such determined and widespread organization as this. It is not the skillful arts of the demagogue that has brought nearly two million farmers into this perfect and pledge-bound society—but it is a deep and abiding conviction that, in political and commercial economy of the day, he is put at a disadvantage that keeps him poor while other classes grow rich, and that bars his way 162to prosperity and independence. General Toombs once said that the farmer, considered the most conservative type of citizenship, is really the most revolutionary. That the farmers of France, flocking to the towns and cities from the unequal burdens of their farms, brought about the French Revolution, and that about once in every century the French peasant raided the towns. Three times the farmers of England have captured and held London. It was the farmers of Mecklenburg that made the first American declaration, and Putnam left his plow standing in the furrow as he hurried to lead the embattled farmers who fought at Concord and Lexington. I realize it is impossible that revolution should be the outcome of our industrial troubles. The farmer of to-day does not consider that remedy for his wrongs. I quote history to show that the farmer, segregated and deliberate, does not move on slight provocation, but organizes only under deep conviction, and that when once organized and convinced, he is terribly in earnest, and is not going to rest until his wrongs are righted.

Now, here we are confronted with the most thorough and widespread agricultural movement of this or any other day. It is the duty alike of farmers and those who stand in other ranks, to get together and consult as to what is the real status and what is the patriotic duty. Not in sullenness, but in frankness. Not as opponents, but as friends—not as enemies, but as brothers begotten of a common mother, banded in common allegiance, and marching to a common destiny. It will not do to say that this organization will pass away, for if the discontent on which it is based survives it, it had better have lived and forced its wrongs to final issue. There is no room for divided hearts in this State, or in this Republic. If we shall restore Georgia to her former greatness and prosperity—if we shall solve the problems that beset the South in honor and safety—if we shall save this Republic from the dangers that threaten it—it will require the earnest and united effort of every patriotic citizen, be he farmer, or merchant, 163or lawyer, or manufacturer. Let us consider then the situation, and decide what is the duty that lies before us.

In discussing this matter briefly, I beg the ladies to give me their attention. I have always believed that there are few affairs of life in which woman should not have a part. Not obtrusive part—for that is unwomanly. The work falling best to the hand of woman is such work as is done by the dews of night—that ride not on the boasting wind, and shine not in the garish sun, but that come when the wind is stilled and the sun is gone, and night has wrapped the earth in its sacred hush, and fall from the distillery of the stars upon the parched and waiting flowers, as a benediction from God.

Let no one doubt the power of this work, though it lack pomp and circumstance. Is Bismarck the mightiest power of this earth, who is attended by martial strains when he walks abroad, and in whose path thrones are scattered as trophies? Why, the little housewife alone in her chimney-corner, musing in her happiness with no trophy in her path save her husband’s loving heart, and no music on her ear save the chirping of the cricket beneath her hearthstone, is his superior. For, while he holds the purse-strings of Germany, she holds the heart-strings of men. She who rocks the cradle rules the world. Give me then your attention, note the conflict that is gathering about us, and take your place with seeming modesty in the ranks of those who fight for right. It is not an abstract political theory that is involved in the contest of which I speak. It is the integrity and independence of your home that is at stake. The battle is not pitched in a distant State. Your home is the battle-field, and by your hearthstones you shall fight for your household gods. With your husband’s arms so wound around you that you can feel his anxious heart beating against your cheek—with your sons, sturdy and loving, holding your old hands in theirs—here on the threshold of your house, under the trees that sheltered your babyhood, with the graves of your dead in that plain enclosure yonder—here men and women, heart to 164heart, with not a man dismayed, not a woman idle—while the multiplied wolves of debt and mortgage, and trust and monopoly, swarm from every thicket; here we must fight the ultimate battle for the independence of our people and the happiness of our homes.

Now let us look at the facts: First, the notable movement of the population in America is from the country to the cities. In 1840—a generation ago, only one-twelfth of the American people lived in cities of more than 8000 people. In 1850, one-eighth; in 1860, one-sixth; in 1870, one-fifth; in 1880, one-fourth. In the past half-century the population of cities has increased more than four times as rapidly as that of the country. Mind you, when I say that the city population has increased in one generation from 8 per cent. to 25 per cent. in population, I mean the population of cities of more than 8000 people. There is not such a city in this congressional district. It is the village and town population, as well as that of the farms, that goes to swell so enormously the population of the great cities. Thus we see diminishing with amazing rapidity that rural population that is the strength and the safety of the people—slow to anger and thus a safeguard, but terrible in its wrath, and thus a tremendous corrective power. No greater calamity could befall any country than the sacrifice of its town and village and country life. I rejoice in Atlanta’s growth, and yet I wonder whether it is worth what it cost when I know that her population has been drawn largely from rural Georgia, and that back of her grandeur are thousands of deserted farms and dismantled homes. As much as I love her—and she is all to me that home can be to any man—if I had the disposal of 100,000 immigrants at her gates to-morrow, 5000 should enter there, 75,000 should be located in the shops and factories in Georgia towns and villages, and 20,000 sent to her farms. It saddens me to see a bright young fellow come to my office from village or country, and I shudder when I think for what a feverish and speculative and uncertain life he has bartered his rural birthright, and surrendered 165the deliberation and tranquillity of his life on the farm. It is just that deliberate life that this country needs, for the fever of the cities is already affecting its system. Character, like corn, is dug from the soil. A contented rural population is not only the measure of our strength, and an assurance of its peace when there should be peace, and a resource of courage when peace would be cowardice—but it is the nursery of the great leaders who have made this country what it is. Washington was born and lived in the country. Jefferson was a farmer. Henry Clay rode his horse to the mill in the slashes. Webster dreamed amid the solitude of Marshfield. Lincoln was a rail splitter. Our own Hill walked between the handles of the plow. Brown peddled barefoot the product of his patch. Stephens found immortality under the trees of his country home. Toombs and Cobb and Calhoun were country gentlemen, and afar from the cities’ maddening strife established that greatness that is the heritage of their people. The cities produce very few leaders. Almost every man in our history formed his character in the leisure and deliberation of village or country life, and drew his strength from the drugs of the earth even as a child draws his from his mother’s breast. In the diminution of this rural population, virtuous and competent, patriotic and honest, living beneath its own roof-tree, building its altars by its own hearthstone and shrining in its own heart its liberty and its conscience, there is abiding cause for regret. In the corresponding growth of our cities—already center spots of danger, with their idle classes, their sharp rich and poor, their corrupt politics, their consorted thieves, and their clubs and societies of anarchy and socialism—I see a pressing and impending danger. Let it be noted that the professions are crowded, that middlemen are multiplied beyond reason, that the factories can in six months supply the demand of twelve—that machinery is constantly taking the place of men—that labor in every department bids against itself until it is mercilessly in the hands of the employer, that the new-comers are largely recruits 166of the idle and dangerous classes, and we can appreciate something of the danger that comes with this increasing movement to strip the villages and the farms and send an increasing volume into the already overcrowded cities. This is but one phase of that tendency to centralization and congestion which is threatening the liberties of this people and the life of this Republic.

Now, let us go one step further. What is the most notable financial movement in America? It is the mortgaging of the farm lands of the country—the bringing of the farmer into bondage to the money-lender. In Illinois the farms are mortgaged for $200,000,000, in Iowa for $140,000,000, in Kansas for $160,000,000, and so on through the Northwest. In Georgia about $20,000,000 of foreign capital holds in mortgage perhaps one-fourth of Georgia’s farms, and the work is but started. Every town has its loan agent—a dozen companies are quartered in Atlanta, and the work goes briskly on. A mortgage is the bulldog of obligations—a very mud-turtle for holding on. It is the heaviest thing of its weight in the world. I had one once, and sometimes I used to feel, as it rested on my roof, deadening the rain that fell there, and absorbing the sunshine, that it would crush through the shingles and the rafters and overwhelm me with its dull and persistent weight, and when at last I paid it off, I went out to look at the shingles to see if it had not flopped back there of its own accord. Think of it, Iowa strips from her farmers $14,000,000 of interest every year, and sends it to New York and Boston to be reloaned on farms in other States, and to support and establish the dominion of the money-lenders over the people. Georgia gathers from her languishing fields $2,000,000 of interest every year, and sends it away forever. Could her farmers but keep it at home, one year’s interest would build factories to supply at cost every yard of bagging and every pound of guano the farmers need, establish her exchanges and their warehouses, and have left more than a million dollars for the improvement of their farms and their homes. And year 167after year this drain not only continues, but deepens. What will be the end? Ireland has found it. Her peasants in their mud cabins, sending every tithe of their earnings to deepen the purple luxury of London, where their landlords live, realize how poor is that country whose farms are owned in mortgage or fee simple by those who live beyond its borders. If every Irish landlord lived on his estate, bought of his tenants the product of their farms, and invested his rents in Irish industries, this Irish question that is the shame of the world would be settled without legislation or strife. Georgia can never go to Ireland’s degradation, but every Georgia farm put under mortgage to a foreign capitalist is a step in that direction, and every dollar sent out as interest leaves the State that much poorer. I do not blame the farmers. It is a miracle that out of their poverty they have done so well. I simply deplore the result, and ask you to note in the millions of acres that annually pass under mortgage to the money-lenders of the East, and in the thousands of independent country homes annually surrendered as hostages to their hands, another evidence of that centralization that is drinking up the life-blood of this broad Republic.

Let us go one step further. All protest as to our industrial condition is met with the statement that America is startling the world with its growth and progress. Is this growth symmetrical—is this progress shared by every class? Let the tax-books of Georgia answer. This year, for the first time since 1860, our taxable wealth is equal to that with which, excluding our slaves, we entered the civil war—$368,000,000. There is cause for rejoicing in this wonderful growth from the ashes and desolation of twenty years ago, but the tax-books show that while the towns and cities are $60,000,000 richer than they were in 1860, the farmers are $50,000,000 poorer.

Who produced this wealth? In 1865, when our towns and cities were paralyzed, when not a mine or quarry was open, hardly a mill or a factory running; when we had neither money or credit, it was the farmers’ cotton that 168started the mills of industry and of trade. Since that desolate year, when, urging his horse down the furrow, plowing through fields on which he had staggered amid the storm of battle, he began the rehabilitation of Georgia with no friend near him save nature that smiled at his kindly touch, and God that sent him the message of cheer through the rustling leaves, he has dug from the soil of Georgia more than $1,000,000,000 worth of product. From this mighty resource great cities have been builded and countless fortunes amassed—but amid all the splendor he has remained the hewer of wood and the drawer of water. He had made the cities $60,000,000 richer than they were when the war began, and he finds himself, in the sweat of whose brow this miracle was wrought, $50,000,000 poorer than he then was. Perhaps not a farmer in this audience knew this fact—but I doubt if there is one in the audience who has not felt in his daily life the disadvantage that in twenty short years has brought about this stupendous difference. Let the figures speak for themselves. The farmer—the first figure to stumble amid the desolate dawn of our new life and to salute the coming day—hurrying to market with the harvest of his hasty planting that Georgia might once more enter the lists of the living States and buy the wherewithal to still her wants and clothe her nakedness—always apparently the master of the situation, has he not been really its slave, when he finds himself at the end of twenty hard and faithful years $110,000,000 out of balance?

Now, let us review the situation a moment. I have shown you, first, that the notable drift of population is to the loss of village and country, and the undue and dangerous growth of the city; second, that the notable movement of finance is that which is bringing villages and country under mortgage to the city; and third, that they who handle the products for sale profit more thereby than those who create them—the difference in one State in twenty years reaching the enormous sum of $110,000,000. Are these healthy tendencies? Do they not demand the earnest and thoughtful consideration of every patriotic citizen? The 169problem of the day is to check these three currents that are already pouring against the bulwarks of our peace and prosperity. To anchor the farmer to his land and the villager to his home; to enable him to till the land under equal conditions and to hold that home in independence; to save with his hands the just proportion of his labor, that he may sow in content and reap in justice,—this is what we need. The danger of the day is centralization, its salvation diffusion. Cut that word deep in your heart. This Republic differs from Russia only because the powers centralized there in one man are here diffused among the people. Western Ohio is happy and tranquil, while Chicago is feverish and dangerous, because the people diffused in the towns and the villages of the one are centralized and packed in the tenements of the other; but of all centralization that menaces our peace and threatens our liberties, is the consolidation of capital—and of all the diffusion that is needed in this Republic, congesting at so many points, is the leveling of our colossal fortunes and the diffusion of our gathered wealth amid the great middle classes of this people. As this question underruns the three tendencies we have been discussing, let us consider it a moment.

Few men comprehend the growth of private fortunes in this country, and the encroachments they have made on the rest of the people. Take one instance: A man in Chicago that had a private fortune secured control of all the wheat in the country, and advanced the price until flour went up three dollars a barrel. When he collected $4,000,000 of this forced tribute from the people, he opened his corner and released the wheat, and the world, forgetting the famishing children from whose hungry lips he had stolen the crust, praised him as the king of finance and trade. Let us analyze this deal. The farmer who raised the wheat got not one cent of the added profit. The mills that ground it not one cent. Every dollar went to swell the toppling fortunes of him who never sowed it to the ground, nor fed it to the thundering wheels, but who knew it only as the 170chance instrument of his infamous scheme. Why, our fathers declared war against England, their mother country, from whose womb they came, because she levied two cents a pound on our tea, and yet, without a murmur, we submit to ten times this tax placed on the bread of our mouths, and levied by a private citizen for no reason save his greed, and no right save his might. Were a man to enter an humble home in England, bind the father helpless, stamp out the fire on the hearthstone, empty the scanty larder, and leave the family for three weeks cold and hungry and helpless, he would be dealt with by the law; and yet four men in New York cornered the world’s cotton crop and held it until the English spindles were stopped and 14,000,000 operatives sent idle and empty-handed to their homes, to divide their last crust with their children, and then sit down and suffer until the greed of the speculators was filled. The sugar refineries combined their plants at a cost of $14,000,000, and so raised the price of sugar that they made the first year $9,500,000 profit, and since then have advanced it rapidly until we sweeten our coffee absolutely in their caprice. When the bagging mills were threatened with a reduced tariff, they made a trust and openly boasted that they intended to make one season’s profits pay the entire cost of their mills—and these precious villains, whom thus far the lightnings have failed to blast, having carried out their infamous boast, organized for a deeper steal this season. And so it goes. There is not a thing we eat or drink, nor an article we must have for the comfort of our homes, that may not be thus seized and controlled and made an instrument for the shameless plundering of the people. It is a shame—this people patient and cheerful under the rise or fall of prices that come with the failure of God’s season’s charge as its compensation—or under the advance at the farm which enriches the farmer, or under that competitive demand which bespeaks brisk prosperity—this people made the prey and the sport of plunderers who levy tribute through a system that mocks at God’s recurring rains, knows not the farmer, and locks competition in 171the grasp of monopoly. And the millions, thus wrung from the people, loaned back to them at usury, laying the blight of the mortgage on their homes, and the obligation of debt on their manhood. Talk about the timidity of capital. That is a forgotten phrase. In the power and irresponsibility of this sudden and enormous wealth is bred an insolence that knows no bounds. “The public be damned!” was the sentiment of the plutocrats, speaking through the voice of Vanderbilt’s millions. In cornering the product and levying the tribute—in locking up abundant supply until the wheels of industry stop—in oppressing through trusts, and domineering in the strength of corporate power, the plutocrats do what no political party would dare attempt and what no government on this earth would enforce. The Czar of Russia would not dare hold up a product until the mill-wheels were idle, or lay an unusual tax on bread and meat to replenish his coffers, and yet these things our plutocrats, flagrant and irresponsible, do day after day until public indignation is indignant and shame is lost in wonder.

And when an outraged people turn to government for help what do they find? Their government in the hands of a party that is in sympathy with their oppressors—that was returned to power with votes purchased with their money—and whose confessed leaders declared that trusts are largely private concerns with which the government had naught to do. Not only is the dominant party the apologist of the plutocrats and the beneficiary of their crimes, but it is based on that principle of centralization through which they came into life and on which alone they can exist. It holds that sovereignty should be taken from the States and lodged with the nation—that political powers and privileges should be wrested from the people and guarded at the capital. It distrusts the people, and even now demands that your ballot-boxes shall be hedged about by its bayonets. It declares that a strong government is better than a free government, and that national authority, backed by national armies and treasury, is a better guarantee 172of peace and prosperity and liberty and enlightenment diffused among the people. To defend this policy, that cannot be maintained by argument or sustained by the love or confidence of the people, it rallies under its flag the mercenaries of the Republic, the syndicate, the trust, the monopolist, and the plutocrat, and strengthening them by grant and protection, rejoices as they grow richer and the people grow poorer. Confident in the debauching power of money and the unscrupulous audacity of their creatures, they catch the spirit of Vanderbilt’s defiance and call aloud from their ramparts, “the people be damned!” I charge that this party has bought its way for twenty years. Its nucleus was the passion that survived the war—and around this it has gathered the protected manufacturer, the pensioned soldier, the licensed monopolist, the privileged corporation, the unchallenged trust—all whom power can daunt, or money can buy, and with these in close and constant phalanx it holds the government against the people. Not a man in all its ranks that is not influenced by prejudice or bought by privilege.

What a spectacle, my countrymen! This free Republic in the hands of a party that withdraws sovereignty from the people that its own authority may be made supreme—that fans the smouldering embers of war, and loosing among the people the dogs of privilege and monopoly to hunt, and harrow and rend, that its lines may be made stronger and its ramparts fortified. And now, it is committed to a crime that is without precedent or parallel in the history of any people, and this crime it is obliged by its own necessity as well as by its pledge to commit as soon as it gets the full reins of power. This crime is hidden in the bill known as the service pension bill, which pensions every man who enlisted for sixty days for the Union army. Let us examine this pension list. Twelve years ago it footed $46,000,000. Last year it was $81,000,000. This year it has already run to over $100,000,000. Of this amount Georgia pays about $3,500,000 a year. Think of it. The money that her people have paid, through indirect 173taxation into the treasury, is given, let us say to Iowa, for that State just equals Georgia in population. Every year $3,500,000 wrung from her pockets and sent into Iowa as pensions for her soldiers. Since 1865, out of her poverty, Georgia has paid $51,000,000 as pensions to Northern soldiers—one-sixth of the value of her whole property. And now it is proposed to enlarge the pension list until it includes every man who enlisted for sixty days. They will not fail. The last Congress passed a pension bill that Commissioner Black—himself a gallant Union general—studied deliberately, and then told the President that if he signed it, it would raise the pension list to $200,000,000, and had it not been for the love of the people that ran in the veins of Grover Cleveland and the courage of Democracy which flamed in his heart, that bill would have been law to-day. A worse bill will be offered. There is a surplus of $120,000,000 in the treasury. While that remains it endangers the protective tariff, behind which the trained captains of the Republican party muster their men. But let the pension list be lifted to $200,000,000 a year. Then the surplus is gone and a deficiency created, and the protective tariff must be not only perpetuated but deepened, and the vigilance of the spies and collectors increased to meet the demands of the government. And back of it all will be mustered the army of a million and a half pensioners, drawing their booty from the Republican party and giving it in turn their purchased allegiance and support.

My countrymen, a thousand times I have thought of that historic scene beneath the apple-tree at Appomattox, of Lee’s 8000 ragged, half-starved immortals, going home to begin anew amid the ashes of their homes, and the graves of their dead, the weary struggle for existence, and Grant’s 68,000 splendid soldiers, well fed and equipped, going home to riot amid the plenty of a grateful and prosperous people, and I have thought how hard it was that out of our poverty we should be taxed to pay their pension, and to divide with this rich people the crust we scraped up from the ashes of our homes. And I have thought when their maimed and 174helpless soldiers were sheltered in superb homes, and lapped in luxury, while our poor cripples limped along the highway or hid their shame in huts, or broke bitter bread in the county poor-house, how hard it was that, of all the millions we send them annually, we can save not one dollar to go to our old heroes, who deserve so much and get so little. And yet we made no complaint. We were willing that every Union soldier made helpless by the war should have his pension and his home, and thank God, without setting our crippled soldiers on the curbstone of distant Babylons to beg, as blind Belisarius did, from the passing stranger. We have provided them a home in which they can rest in honorable peace until God has called them hence to a home not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. We have not complained that our earnings have gone to pension Union soldiers—the maimed soldiers of the Union armies. But the scheme to rob the people that every man who enlisted for sixty days, or his widow, shall be supported at public expense is an outrage that must not be submitted to. It is not patriotism—it is politics. It is not honesty—it is plunder. The South has played a patient and a waiting game for twenty years, fearing to protest against what she knew to be wrong in the fear that she would be misunderstood. I fear that she has gained little by this course save the contempt of her enemies. The time has come when she should stand upright among the States of this Republic and declare her mind and stand by her convictions. She must not stand silent while this crowning outrage is perpetrated. It means that the Republican party will loot the treasury to recruit its ranks—that $70,000,000 a year shall be taken from the South to enrich the North, thus building up one section against another—that the protective tariff shall be deepened, thus building one class against another, and that the party of trusts and monopoly shall be kept in power, the autonomy of the Republic lost, the government centralized, the oligarchs established, and justice to the people postponed. But this party will not prevail, even though its pension bill should pass, and its pretorial God be established 175in every Northern State. It was Louis XVI. who peddled the taxing privileges to his friends, and when the people protested surrounded himself with an army of Swiss mercenaries. His minister, Neckar, said to him: “Sire, I beseech you send away these Swiss and trust your people”; but the king, confident in his strength and phalanx, buckled it close about him and plundered the people until his head paid the penalty of his crime. So this party, bartering privileges and setting up classes, may feel secure as it closes the ranks of its mercenaries, but some day the great American heart will burst with righteous wrath, and the voice of the people, which is the voice of God, will challenge the traitors, and the great masses will rise in their might, and breaking down the defenses of the oligarchs, will hurl them from power and restore this Republic to the old moorings from which it had been swept by the storm.

The government can protect its citizens. It is of the people, and it shall not perish from the face of the earth. It can top off these colossal fortunes and, by an income tax, retard their growth. It can set a limit to personal and corporate wealth. It can take trusts and syndicates by the throat. It can shatter monopoly; it can equalize the burden of taxation; it can distribute its privileges impartially; it can clothe with credit its land now discredited at its banks; it can lift the burdens from the farmer’s shoulders, give him equal strength to bear them—it can trust the people in whose name this Republic was founded; in whose courage it was defended; in whose wisdom it has been administered, and whose stricken love and confidence it can not survive.

But the government, no matter what it does, does not do all that is needed, nor the most; that is conceded, for all true reform must begin with the people at their homes. A few Sundays ago I stood on a hill in Washington. My heart thrilled as I looked on the towering marble of my country’s Capitol, and a mist gathered in my eyes as, standing there, I thought of its tremendous significance and the powers there assembled, and the responsibilities there 176centered—its presidents, its congress, its courts, its gathered treasure, its army, its navy, and its 60,000,000 of citizens. It seemed to me the best and mightiest sight that the sun could find in its wheeling course—this majestic home of a Republic that has taught the world its best lessons of liberty—and I felt that if wisdom, and justice, and honor abided therein, the world would stand indebted to this temple on which my eyes rested, and in which the ark of my covenant was lodged for its final uplifting and regeneration.

A few days later I visited a country home. A modest, quiet house sheltered by great trees and set in a circle of field and meadow, gracious with the promise of harvest—barns and cribs well filled and the old smoke-house odorous with treasure—the fragrance of pink and hollyhock mingling with the aroma of garden and orchard, and resonant with the hum of bees and poultry’s busy clucking—inside the house, thrift, comfort and that cleanliness that is next to godliness—the restful beds, the open fireplace, the books and papers, and the old clock that had held its steadfast pace amid the frolic of weddings, that had welcomed in steady measure the newborn babes of the family, and kept company with the watchers of the sick bed, and had ticked the solemn requiem of the dead; and the well-worn Bible that, thumbed by fingers long since stilled, and blurred with tears of eyes long since closed, held the simple annals of the family, and the heart and conscience of the home. Outside stood the master, strong and wholesome and upright; wearing no man’s collar; with no mortgage on his roof, and no lien on his ripening harvest; pitching his crops in his own wisdom, and selling them in his own time in his chosen market; master of his lands and master of himself. Near by stood his aged father, happy in the heart and home of his son. And as they started to the house the old man’s hands rested on the young man’s shoulder, touching it with the knighthood of the fourth commandment, and laying there the unspeakable blessing of an honored and grateful father. As they drew near the 177door the old mother appeared; the sunset falling on her face, softening its wrinkles and its tenderness, lighting up her patient eyes, and the rich music of her heart trembling on her lips, as in simple phrase she welcomed her husband and son to their home. Beyond was the good wife, true of touch and tender, happy amid her household cares, clean of heart and conscience, the helpmate and the buckler of her husband. And the children, strong and sturdy, trooping down the lane with the lowing herd, or weary of simple sport, seeking, as truant birds do, the quiet of the old home nest. And I saw the night descend on that home, falling gently as from the wings of the unseen dove. And the stars swarmed in the bending skies—the trees thrilled with the cricket’s cry—the restless bird called from the neighboring wood—and the father, a simple man of God, gathering the family about him, read from the Bible the old, old story of love and faith, and then went down in prayer, the baby hidden amid the folds of its mother’s dress, and closed the record of that simple day by calling down the benediction of God on the family and the home!

And as I gazed the memory of the great Capitol faded from my brain. Forgotten its treasure and its splendor. And I said, “Surely here—here in the homes of the people is lodged the ark of the covenant of my country. Here is its majesty and its strength. Here the beginning of its power and the end of its responsibility.” The homes of the people; let us keep them pure and independent, and all will be well with the Republic. Here is the lesson our foes may learn—here is work the humblest and weakest hands may do. Let us in simple thrift and economy make our homes independent. Let us in frugal industry make them self-sustaining. In sacrifice and denial let us keep them free from debt and obligation. Let us make them homes of refinement in which we shall teach our daughters that modesty and patience and gentleness are the charms of woman. Let us make them temples of liberty, and teach our sons that an honest conscience is every man’s first political law. That his sovereignty rests beneath his hat, 178and that no splendor can rob him and no force justify the surrender of the simplest right of a free and independent citizen. And above all, let us honor God in our homes—anchor them close in His love. Build His altars above our hearthstones, uphold them in the set and simple faith of our fathers and crown them with the Bible—that book of books in which all the ways of life are made straight and the mystery of death is made plain. The home is the source of our national life. Back of the national Capitol and above it stands the home. Back of the President and above him stands the citizen. What the home is, this and nothing else will the Capitol be. What the citizen wills, this and nothing else will the President be.

Now, my friends, I am no farmer. I have not sought to teach you the details of your work, for I know little of them. I have not commended your splendid local advantages, for that I shall do elsewhere. I have not discussed the differences between the farmer and other classes, for I believe in essential things there is no difference between them, and that minor differences should be sacrificed to the greater interest that depends on a united people. I seek not to divide our people, but to unite them. I should despise myself if I pandered to the prejudice of either class to win the applause of the other.

But I have noted these great movements that destroy the equilibrium and threaten the prosperity of my country, and standing above passion and prejudice or demagoguery I invoke every true citizen, fighting from his hearthstone outward, with the prattle of his children on his ear, and the hand of his wife and mother closely clasped, to determine here to make his home sustaining and independent, and to pledge eternal hostility to the forces that threaten our liberties, and the party that stands behind it.

When I think of the tremendous force of the currents against which we must fight, of the great political party that impels that fight, of the countless host of mercenaries that fight under its flag, of the enormous powers of government 179privilege and monopoly that back them up, I confess my heart sinks within me, and I grow faint. But I remember that the servant of Elisha looked abroad from Samaria and beheld the hosts that encompassed the city, and said in agonized fear: “Alas, master, what shall we do?” and the answer of Elisha was the answer of every brave man and faithful heart in all ages: “Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them,” and this faith opened the eyes of the servant of the man of God, and he looked up again, and lo, the air was filled with chariots of fire, and the mountains were filled with horsemen, and they compassed the city about as a mighty and unconquerable host. Let us fight in such faith, and fear not. The air all about us is filled with chariots of unseen allies, and the mountains are thronged with unseen knights that shall fight with us. Fear not, for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. Buckle on your armor, gird about your loins, stand upright and dauntless while I summon you to the presence of the immortal dead. Your fathers and mine yet live, though they speak not, and will consecrate this air with their wheeling chariots, and above them and beyond them to the Lord God Almighty, King of the Hosts in whose unhindered splendor we stand this morning. Look up to them, be of good cheer, and faint not, for they shall fight with us when we strike for liberty and truth, and all the world, though it be banded against us, shall not prevail against them.

IN his Speech at the Annual Banquet of the Boston Merchants’ Association in December, 1889, Mr. Grady said:

Mr. President: Bidden by your invitation to a discussion of the race problem—forbidden by occasion to make a political speech—I appreciate in trying to reconcile orders with propriety the predicament of the little maid who, bidden to learn to swim, was yet adjured, “Now, go, my darling, hang your clothes on a hickory limb, and don’t go near the water.”

The stoutest apostle of the church, they say, is the missionary, and the missionary, wherever he unfurls his flag, will never find himself in deeper need of unction and address than I, bidden to-night to plant the standard of a Southern Democrat in Boston’s banquet hall, and discuss the problem of the races in the home of Phillips and of Sumner. But, Mr. President, if a purpose to speak in perfect frankness and sincerity; if earnest understanding of the vast interests involved; if a consecrating sense of what disaster may follow further misunderstanding and estrangement, if these may be counted to steady undisciplined speech and to strengthen an untried arm—then, sir, I find the courage to proceed.

Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New England’s historic soil, and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and her thrift. Here, within 181touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill—where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing preached—here in the cradle of American letters, and almost of American liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New England when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange apparition! This stern and unique figure—carved from the ocean and the wilderness—its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winters and of wars—until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base—while startled kings and emperors gazed and marveled that from the rude touch of this handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied genius of human government, and the perfected model of human liberty! God bless the memory of those immortal workers—and prosper the fortunes of their living sons—and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.

Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done everywhere, every word I then uttered—to declare that the sentiments I then avowed were universally approved in the South—I realize that the confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that confidence by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess, Mr. President—before the praise of New England has died on my lips—that I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of 17,000 Vermont Democrats that for twenty-two years, undiminished by death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched over their rugged hills, cast their Democratic ballots, and gone back home to pray for their unregenerate neighbors, and awake to read the record of 26,000 Republican majority. May the God of the helpless and the heroic help them—and may their sturdy tribe increase!

Far to the south, Mr. President, separated from this 182section by a line, once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There, is centered all that can please or prosper humankind. A perfect climate, above a fertile soil, yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There, are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests, vast and primeval, and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries—cotton, iron and wool—that region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly—in iron, proven supremacy—in timber, the reserve supply of the Republic. From this assured and permanent advantage, against which artificial conditions cannot much longer prevail, has grown an amazing system of industries. Not maintained by human contrivance of tariff or capital, afar off from the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in Divine assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest—not set amid costly farms from which competition has driven the farmer in despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which neither season nor soil has set a limit—this system of industries is mounting to a splendor that shall dazzle and illumine the world.

That, sir, is the picture and the promise of my home—a land better and fairer than I have told you, and yet but fit setting, in its material excellence, for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizenship. Against that, sir, we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its sturdy loins, shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers and touching this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet, while in the Eldorado of which I have told you, but 15 per cent. of lands are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched and its population so scant that, 183were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could not be heard from Virginia to Texas—while on the threshold of nearly every house in New England stands a son, seeking with troubled eyes some new land in which to carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains that in 1880 the South had fewer Northern-born citizens than she had in 1870—fewer in ’70 than in ’60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the sectional line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of the North have crossed it over to the South than when it was crimson with the best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholder stood guard every inch of its way?

There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing, sir, but this problem, and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices at Manassas and Gettysburg, and illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon’s mouth.

If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night—hear one thing more. My people, your brothers in the South—brothers in blood, in destiny, in all that is best in our past and future—are so beset with this problem that their very existence depends upon its right solution. Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-ships of the Republic sailed from your ports—the slaves worked in our fields. You will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do hereby declare that in its wise and humane administration, in lifting the slave to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving him a 184happiness he has not yet found in freedom—our fathers left their sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human slavery is gone forever from the American soil. But the freedman remains. With him a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil—with equal political and civil rights—almost equal in numbers, but terribly unequal in intelligence and responsibility—each pledged against fusion—one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last by a desolating war—the experiment sought by neither, but approached by both with doubt—these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at every point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to the end.

Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship. Never before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed, because he hindered the way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this Republic because he is an alien and inferior. The red man was owner of the land—the yellow man highly civilized and assimilable—but they hindered both sections and are gone! But the black man, affecting but one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity. It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded, without rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and blacks have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however similar, have lived anywhere at any time on the same soil with equal rights in peace! In spite of these things we are commanded to make good this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American prejudice—to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible between whites and blacks—and to reverse, 185under the very worst conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay—a rigor that accepts no excuse—and a suspicion that discourages frankness and sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would—so bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know; we cannot solve it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy—with less than the knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood—and that when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving hearts.

The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South—the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history—whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war—whose energy has made bricks without straw and spread splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes—these men wear this problem in their hearts and their brains, by day and by night. They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means—what they owe to this kindly and dependent race—the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march encumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!

Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr. President, we need not go one step further 186unless you concede right here the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible, and as just as your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place, to rightly solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense and common honesty—wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly disregard—guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and irresponsible of either race—compensating error with frankness, and retrieving in patience what they lose in passion—and conscious all the time that wrong means ruin,—admit this, and we may reach an understanding to-night.

The President of the United States in his late message to Congress, discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem, asks: “Are they at work upon it? What solution do they offer? When will the black man cast a free ballot? When will he have the civil rights that are his?” I shall not here protest against the partisanry that, for the first time in our history in time of peace, has stamped with the great seal of our government a stigma upon the people of a great and loyal section, though I gratefully remember that the great dead soldier who held the helm of state for the eight stormiest years of reconstruction never found need for such a step; and though there is no personal sacrifice I would not make to remove this cruel and unjust imputation on my people from the archives of my country! But, sir, backed by a record on every page of which is progress, I venture to make earnest and respectful answer to the questions that are asked. I bespeak your patience, while with vigorous plainness of speech, seeking your judgment rather than your applause, I proceed step by step. We give to the world this year a crop of 7,500,000 bales of cotton, worth $45,000,000, and its cash equivalent in grain, grasses and fruit. This enormous crop could not have come from the 187hands of sullen and discontented labor. It comes from peaceful fields, in which laughter and gossip rise above the hum of industry, and contentment runs with the singing plow.

It is claimed that this ignorant labor is defrauded of its just hire. I present the tax-books of Georgia, which show that the negro, 25 years ago a slave, has in Georgia alone $10,000,000 of assessed property, worth twice that much. Does not that record honor him, and vindicate his neighbors? What people, penniless, illiterate, has done so well? For every Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers, I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their children the helpful message their State sends them from the schoolhouse door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than $1,000,000—and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered—of the fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for $10,000,000, and yet 49 per cent. of the beneficiaries are black children—and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps, or can help, our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston. Although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of little, the South with one-seventh of the taxable property of the country, with relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth as much public land, and having back of its tax-books none of the half billion of bonds that enrich the North—and though it pays annually $26,000,000 to your section as pensions—yet gives nearly one-sixth of the public-school fund. The South since 1865 has spent $122,000,000 in education, and this year is pledged to $37,000,000 for state and city schools, although the blacks paying one-thirtieth of the taxes get nearly one-half of the fund.

Go into our fields and see whites and blacks working side by side. On our buildings in the same squad. In our 188shops at the same forge. Often the blacks crowd the whites from work, or lower wages by the greater need or simpler habits, and yet are permitted because we want to bar them from no avenue in which their feet are fitted to tread. They could not there be elected orators of the white universities, as they have been here, but they do enter there a hundred useful trades that are closed against them here. We hold it better and wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the exotic in the window. In the South, there are negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists, doctors, preachers, multiplying with the increasing ability of their race to support them. In villages and towns they have their military companies equipped from the armories of the State, their churches and societies built and supported largely by their neighbors. What is the testimony of the courts? In penal legislation we have steadily reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and have led the world in mitigating punishment for crime, that we might save, as far as possible, this dependent race from its own weakness. In our penitentiary record 60 per cent. of the prosecutors are negroes, and in every court the negro criminal strikes the colored juror, that white men may judge his case. In the North, one negro in every 1865 is in jail—in the South only one in 446. In the North the percentage of negro prisoners is six times as great as native whites—in the South, only four times as great. If prejudice wrongs him in southern courts, the record shows it to be deeper in northern courts.

I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and upright as the bar of Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion, that in the southern courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life, liberty or property, the negro has distinct advantage because he is a negro, apt to be over-reached, oppressed—and that this advantage reaches from the juror in making his verdict to the judge in measuring his sentence. Now, Mr. President, can it be seriously maintained that we are terrorizing the people from whose willing hands come every year $1,000,000,000 of farm 189crops? Or have robbed a people, who twenty-five years from unrewarded slavery have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of property? Or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every day? Or deceive them when we are educating them to the utmost limit of our ability? Or outlaw them when we work side by side with them? Or re-enslave them under legal forms when for their benefit we have even imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of law? My fellow countryman, as you yourself may sometimes have to appeal to the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these incontestible facts.

But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and violence. This I admit. And there will be until there is one ideal community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely it is misjudged! It is hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of servitude, these dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition, inflamed by prejudice and partisanry, has led to injustice and delusion. Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted as an incident—in the South a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit of the community. Regulators may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons, and it scarcely arrests attention—a chance collision in the South among relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one race is destroying the other. We might as well claim that the Union was ungrateful to the colored soldiers who followed its flag, because a Grand Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran, as for you to give racial significance to every incident in the South, or to accept exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one of those who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either section, and belie American character by declaring them to be significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are neither, and stand 190for nothing but the passion and the sin of our poor fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that society, sentient and responsible in every fibre, can mend and repair until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither. These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia’s busy life as they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And if they did, not one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is through them, and the men who think with them—making nine-tenths of every southern community—that these two races have been carried thus far with less of violence than would have been possible anywhere else on earth. And in their fairness and courage and steadfastness—more than in all the laws that can be passed or all the bayonets that can be mustered—is the hope of our future.

When will the black cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not dominated by the will of the intelligent; when the laborer anywhere casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor anywhere is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the steadfast do not everywhere control the suffrage of the weak and shiftless—then and not till then will the ballot of the negro be free. The white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in prejudice against the blacks—not in sectional estrangement, not in the hope of political dominion—but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is this vast ignorant and purchasable vote—clannish, credulous, impulsive and passionate—tempting every art of the demagogue, but insensible to the appeal of the statesman. Wrongly started, in that it was led into alienation from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the two great parties through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even that information on which conviction must be based. It must remain a faction—strong enough in every community to control on the slightest 191division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed on, its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses misdirected—and even its superstition made to play its part in a campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as this—the folly and the bitterness and the danger of which every southern community has drunk deeply—that the white people of the South are banded together. Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if 300,000 black men, not one in a hundred able to read his ballot—banded in race instinct, holding against you the memory of a century of slavery, taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already travestied legislation from your statehouse, and in every species of folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your credit.

But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long been flippantly charged to be evidence, and has now been solemnly and officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on our part. Let us see. Virginia—a State now under fierce assault for this alleged crime—cast in 1888 75 per cent. of her vote. Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, 60 per cent. of her vote. Was it suppression in Virginia and natural causes in Massachusetts? Last month Virginia cast 69 per cent. of her vote, and Massachusetts, fighting in every district, cast only 49 per cent. of hers. If Virginia is condemned because 31 per cent. of her vote was silent, how shall this State escape in which 51 per cent. was dumb? Let us enlarge this comparison. The sixteen southern States in 1888 cast 67 per cent. of their total vote—the six New England States but 63 per cent. of theirs. By what fair rule shall the stigma be put upon one section, while the other escapes? A congressional election in New York last week, with the polling-place in touch of every 192voter, brought out only 6000 votes of 28,000—and the lack of opposition is assigned as the natural cause. In a district in my State, in which an opposition speech has not been heard in ten years, and the polling-places are miles apart—under the unfair reasoning of which my section has been a constant victim—the small vote is charged to be proof of forcible suppression. In Virginia an average majority of 10,000, under hopeless division of the minority, was raised to 42,000; in Iowa, in the same election, a majority of 32,000 was wiped out, and an opposition majority of 8000 was established. The change of 42,000 votes in Iowa is accepted as political revolution—in Virginia an increase of 30,000 on a safe majority is declared to be proof of political fraud. I charge these facts and figures home, sir, to the heart and conscience of the American people, who will not assuredly see one section condemned for what another section is excused!

If I can drive them through the prejudice of the partisan, and have them read and pondered at the fireside of the citizen, I will rest on the judgment there formed and the verdict there rendered!

It is deplorable, sir, that in both sections a larger percentage of the vote is not regularly cast, but more inexplicable that this should be so in New England than in the South. What invites the negro to the ballot-box? He knows that, of all men, it has promised him most and yielded him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of “forty acres and a mule.” His second, the threat that Democratic success meant his re-inslavement. Both have proved false in his experience. He looked for a home, and he got the freedman’s bank. He fought under the promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his neighbors, with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up in his—and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss of their confidence and sympathy that is at last his best and his enduring hope. And so, without leaders or organization—and 193lacking the resolute heroism of my party friends in Vermont that makes their hopeless march over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage—he shrewdly measures the occasional agitator, balances his little account with politics, touches up his mule and jogs down the furrow, letting the mad world jog as it will!

The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if partisans in the North would understand this. I have seen the white people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and touching their eyes with faith, bid them look abroad to see the very air “filled with the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof.” If there is any human force that cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law or divorced in force. It is the inalienable right of every free community—and the just and righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or shotgun; but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility, massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it all the powers of the earth shall not prevail. It was just as certain that Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white race—that before the moral and material power of her people once more unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was left alone vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts—as that night should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass force bills, but they will not avail. You may surrender your own liberties to Federal election law, you may submit, in fear of a necessity that does not exist, that the very form of this government may be changed—this old State that holds in its charter the boast that “it is a free and independent commonwealth”—it 194may deliver its election machinery into the hands of the government it helped to create—but never, sir, will a single State of this Union, North or South, be delivered again to the control of an ignorant and inferior race. We wrested our State government from negro supremacy when the Federal drumbeat rolled closer to the ballot-box and Federal bayonets hedged it deeper about than will ever again be permitted in this free government. But, sir, though the cannon of this Republic thundered in every voting district of the South, we still should find in the mercy of God the means and the courage to prevent its re-establishment!

I regret, sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in seeming estrangement to the North. If, sir, any man will point out to me a path down which the white people of the South divided may walk in peace and honor, I will take that path though I took it alone—for at the end, and nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section and the full restoration of this Union. But, sir, if the negro had not been enfranchised, the South would have been divided and the Republic united. His enfranchisement—against which I enter no protest—holds the South united and compact. What solution, then, can we offer for the problem? Time alone can disclose it to us. We simply report progress and ask your patience. If the problem be solved at all—and I firmly believe it will, though nowhere else has it been—it will be solved by the people most deeply bound in interest, most deeply pledged in honor to its solution. I had rather see my people render back this question lightly solved than to see them gather all the spoils over which faction has contended since Catiline conspired and Cæsar fought. Meantime we treat the negro fairly, measuring to him justice in the fullness the strong should give to the weak, and leading him in the steadfast ways of citizenship that he may no longer be the prey of the unscrupulous and the sport of the thoughtless. We open to him every pursuit in which he can prosper, and seek to broaden his training and capacity. We seek to 195hold his confidence and friendship, and to pin him to the soil with ownership, that he may catch in the fire of his own hearthstone that sense of responsibility the shiftless can never know. And we gather him into that alliance of intelligence and responsibility that, though it now runs close to racial lines, welcomes the responsible and intelligent of any race. By this course, confirmed in our judgment and justified in the progress already made, we hope to progress slowly but surely to the end.

The love we feel for that race you cannot measure nor comprehend. As I attest it here, the spirit of my old black mammy from her home up there looks down to bless, and through the tumult of this night steals the sweet music of her croonings as thirty years ago she held me in her black arms and led me smiling into sleep. This scene vanishes as I speak, and I catch a vision of an old Southern home, with its lofty pillars, and its white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air. I see women with strained and anxious faces, and children alert yet helpless. I see night come down with its dangers and its apprehensions, and in a big homely room I feel on my tired head the touch of loving hands—now worn and wrinkled, but fairer to me yet than the hands of mortal woman, and stronger yet to lead me than the hands of mortal man—as they lay a mother’s blessing there while at her knees—the truest altar I yet have found—I thank God that she is safe in her sanctuary, because her slaves, sentinel in the silent cabin or guard at her chamber door, puts a black man’s loyalty between her and danger.

I catch another vision. The crisis of battle—a soldier struck, staggering, fallen. I see a slave, scuffling through the smoke, winding his black arms about the fallen form, reckless of the hurtling death—bending his trusty face to catch the words that tremble on the stricken lips, so wrestling meantime with agony that he would lay down his life in his master’s stead. I see him by the weary bedside, ministering with uncomplaining patience, praying with all his humble heart that God will lift his master up, until 196death comes in mercy and in honor to still the soldier’s agony and seal the soldier’s life. I see him by the open grave, mute, motionless, uncovered, suffering for the death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him when the mound is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave comes a voice saying: “Follow him! Put your arms about him in his need, even as he puts his about me. Be his friend as he was mine.” And out into this new world—strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering both—I follow! And may God forget my people—when they forget these!

Whatever the future may hold for them—whether they plod along in the servitude from which they have never been lifted since the Cyrenian was laid hold upon by the Roman soldiers and made to bear the cross of the fainting Christ—whether they find homes again in Africa, and thus hasten the prophecy of the psalmist who said: “And suddenly Ethiopia shall hold out her hands unto God”—whether, forever dislocated and separated, they remain a weak people beset by stronger, and exist as the Turk, who lives in the jealousy rather than in the conscience of Europe—or whether in this miraculous Republic they break through the caste of twenty centuries and, belying universal history, reach the full stature of citizenship, and in peace maintain it—we shall give them uttermost justice and abiding friendship. And whatever we do, into whatever seeming estrangement we may be driven, nothing shall disturb the love we bear this Republic, or mitigate our consecration to its service. I stand here, Mr. President, to profess no new loyalty. When General Lee, whose heart was the temple of our hopes and whose arm was clothed with our strength, renewed his allegiance to the government of Appomattox, he spoke from a heart too great to be false, and he spoke for every honest man from Maryland 197to Texas. From that day to this, Hamilcar has nowhere in the South sworn young Hannibal to hatred and vengeance—but everywhere to loyalty and to love. Witness the soldier standing at the base of a Confederate monument above the graves of his comrades, his empty sleeve tossing in the April wind, adjuring the young men about him, to serve as honest and loyal citizens the government against which their fathers fought. This message, delivered from that sacred presence, has gone home to the hearts of my fellows! And, sir, I declare here, if physical courage be always equal to human aspiration, that they would die, sir, if need be, to restore this Republic their fathers fought to dissolve!

Such, Mr. President, is this problem as we see it; such is the temper in which we approach it: such the progress made. What do we ask of you? First, patience; out of this alone can come perfect work. Second, confidence; in this alone can you judge fairly. Third, sympathy; in this you can help us best. Fourth, give us your sons as hostages. When you plant your capital in millions, send your sons that they may help know how true are our hearts and may help to swell the Anglo-Saxon current until it can carry without danger this black infusion. Fifth, loyalty to the Republic—for there is sectionalism in loyalty as in estrangement. This hour little needs the loyalty that is loyal to one section and yet holds the other in enduring suspicion and estrangement. Give us the broad and perfect loyalty that loves and trusts Georgia alike with Massachusetts—that knows no south, no north, no east, no west; but endears with equal and patriotic love every foot of our soil, every State in our Union.

A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever divides. We, sir, are Americans—and we fight for human liberty. The uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth. France, Brazil—these are our victories. To redeem the earth from kingcraft and oppression—this is our mission. 198And we shall not fail. God has sown in our soil the seed of his millennial harvest, and he will not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until his full and perfect day has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown all the way—aye, even from the hour when, from the voiceless and trackless ocean, a new world rose to the sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that stupendous day—when the old world will come to marvel and to learn, amid our gathered treasures—let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past with the spectacle of a Republic compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love—loving from the lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill—serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory—blazing out the path, and making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in God’s appointed time!

DURING Mr. Grady’s Visit to Boston, in 1889, he was a Guest of the Bay State Club, before whom he Delivered the following Speech:

Mr. President and Gentlemen: I am confident you will not expect a speech from me this afternoon, especially as my voice is in such a condition that I can hardly talk. I am free to say that it is not a lack of ability to talk, because I am a talker by inheritance. My father was an Irishman, my mother was a woman; both talked. I came by it honestly.

I don’t know how I could take up any discussion here on any topic apart from the incidents of the past two days. I saw this morning Plymouth Rock. I was pulled up on top of it and was told to make a speech.

It reminded me of an old friend of mind, Judge Dooley, of Georgia, who was a very provoking fellow and was always getting challenged to duels, and never fighting them. He always got out of it by being smarter than the other fellow. One day he went out to fight a man with one leg, and he insisted on bringing along a bee gum and sticking one leg into it so that he would have no more flesh exposed than his antagonist. On the occasion I am thinking of, however, he went out to fight with a man who had St. Vitus’s dance, and the fellow stood before him holding the pistol cocked and primed, his hand shaking. The judge 200went quietly and got a forked stick and stuck it up in front of him.

“What’s that for?” said the man.

“I want you to shoot with a rest, so that if you hit me you will bore only one hole. If you shoot that way you will fill me full of holes with one shot.”

I was reminded of that and forced to tell my friends that I could not think of speaking on top of Plymouth Rock without a rest.

But I said this, and I want to say it here again, for I never knew how true it was till I had heard myself say it and had taken the evidence of my voice, as well as my thoughts—that there is no spot on earth that I had rather have seen than that. I have a boy who is the pride and the promise of my life, and God knows I want him to be a good citizen and a good man, and there is no spot in all this broad Republic nor in all this world where I had rather have him stand to learn the lessons of right citizenship, of individual liberty, of fortitude and heroism and justice, than the spot on which I stood this morning, reverent and uncovered.

Now, I do not intend to make a political speech, although when Mr. Cleveland expressed some surprise at seeing me here, I said: “Why, I am at home now; I was out visiting last night.” I was visiting mighty clever folks, but still I was visiting. Now I am at home.

It is the glory and the promise of Democracy, it seems to me, that its success means more than partisanry can mean. I have been told that what I said helped the Democratic party in this State. Well, the chief joy that I feel at that, and that you feel, is that, beyond that and above it, it helped those larger interests of the Republic, and those essential interests of humanity that for seventy years the Democratic party has stood for, being the guarantor and the defender.

Now, Mr. Cleveland last night made—I trust this will not get into the papers—one of the best Democratic speeches I ever heard in my life, and yet all around sat 201Republicans cheering him to the echo. It was just simply because he pitched his speech on a high key, and because he said things that no man, no matter how partisan he was, could gainsay.

Now it seems to me we do not care much for political success in the South—for a simple question of spoils or of patronage. We wanted to see one Democratic administration since General Lee surrendered at Appomattox, just to prove to the people of this world that the South was not the wrong-headed and impulsive and passionate section she was represented to be. I heard last night from Mr. Cleveland, our great leader, as he sat by me, that he held to be the miracle of modern history the conservatism and the temperance and the quiet with which the South accepted his election, and the few office-seekers in comparison that came from that section to besiege and importune him.

Now it seems to me that the struggle in this country, the great fight, the roar and din of which we already hear, is a fight against the consolidation of power, the concentration of capital, the diminution of local sovereignty and the dwarfing of the individual citizen. Boston is the home of the one section of a nationalist party that claims that the remedy for all our troubles, the way in which Dives, who sits inside the gate, shall be controlled, and the poor Lazarus who sits outside shall be lifted up, is for the government to usurp the functions of the citizen and take charge of all his affairs. It is the Democratic doctrine that the citizen is the master and that the best guarantee of this government is not garnered powers at the capital, but diffused intelligence and liberty among the people.

My friend, General Collins—who, by the way, captured my whole State and absolutely conjured the ladies—when he came down there talked about this to us, and he gave us a train of thought that we have improved to advantage.

It is the pride, I believe, of the South, with her simple faith and her homogeneous people, that we elevate there the citizen above the party, and the citizen above everything. 202We teach a man that his best guide at least is his own conscience, that his sovereignty rests beneath his hat, that his own right arm and his own stout heart are his best dependence; that he should rely on his State for nothing that he can do for himself, and on his government for nothing that his State can do for him; but that he should stand upright and self-respecting, dowering his family in the sweat of his brow, loving to his State, loyal to his Republic, earnest in his allegiance wherever it rests, but building at last his altars above his own hearthstone, and shrining his own liberty in his own heart. That is a sentiment that I would not have been afraid to avow last night. And yet it is mighty good democratic doctrine, too.

I went to Washington the other day and I stood on the Capitol hill, and my heart beat quick as I looked at the towering marble of my country’s Capitol, and a mist gathered in my eyes as I thought of its tremendous significance, of the armies and the treasury, and the judges and the President, and the Congress and the courts, and all that was gathered there; and I felt that the sun in all its course could not look down on a better sight than that majestic home of a Republic that had taught the world its best lessons of liberty. And I felt that if honor and wisdom and justice abided therein, the world would at last owe that great house in which the ark of the covenant of my country is lodged its final uplifting and its regeneration.

But a few days afterwards I went to visit a friend in the country, a modest man, with a quiet country home. It was just a simple, unpretentious house, set about with great trees and encircled in meadow and field rich with the promise of harvest; the fragrance of the pink and the hollyhock in the front yard was mingled with the aroma of the orchard and the garden, and the resonant clucking of poultry and the hum of bees. Inside was quiet, cleanliness, thrift and comfort.

Outside there stood my friend, the master—a simple, independent, upright man, with no mortgage on his roof, 203no lien on his growing crops—master of his land and master of himself. There was his old father, an aged and trembling man, but happy in the heart and home of his son. And, as he started to enter his home, the hand of the old man went down on the young man’s shoulder, laying there the unspeakable blessing of an honored and honorable father, and ennobling it with the knighthood of the fifth commandment. And as we approached the door the mother came, a happy smile lighting up her face, while with the rich music of her heart she bade her husband and her son welcome to their home. Beyond was the housewife, busy with her domestic affairs, the loving helpmate of her husband. Down the lane came the children after the cows, singing sweetly, as like birds they sought the quiet of their nest.

So the night came down on that house, falling gently as the wing from an unseen dove. And the old man, while a startled bird called from the forest and the trees thrilled with the cricket’s cry, and the stars were falling from the sky, called the family around him and took the Bible from the table and called them to their knees. The little baby hid in the folds of its mother’s dress while he closed the record of that day by calling down God’s blessing on that simple home. While I gazed, the vision of the marble Capitol faded; forgotten were its treasuries and its majesty; and I said: “Surely here in the homes of the people lodge at last the strength and the responsibility of this government, the hope and the promise of this Republic.”

My friends, that is the democracy in the South; that is the democratic doctrine we preach; a doctrine, sir, that is writ above our hearthstones. We aim to make our homes, poor as they are, self-respecting and independent. We try to make them temples of refinement, in which our daughters may learn that woman’s best charm and strength is her gentleness and her grace, and temples of liberty in which our sons may learn that no power can justify and no treasure repay for the surrender of the slightest right of a free individual American citizen.

204Now you do not know how we love you Democrats. Had we better print that? Yes, we do, of course we do. If a man does not love his home folks, who should he love? We know how gallant a fight you have made here, not as hard and hopeless as our friends in Vermont, but still an up-hill fight. You have been doing better, much better.

Now, gentlemen, I have some mighty good Democrats here. There is one of the fattest and best in the world sitting right over there [pointing to his partner, Mr. Howell].

You want to know about the South. My friends, we representative men will tell you about it. I just want to say that we have had a hard time down there.

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. 205They 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 206this 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 207name, and remember that Boston or Massachusetts is the watchword, and we will meet you at the gates.

208

HENRY W. GRADY’S ATLANTA HOME.

SINCE my experience with the case of “Sallie,” I feel a hesitation in presenting a new heroine to the attention of the public.

You see, I do not mind the real sorrow that I experienced when my sincere efforts to improve the condition of this child came to naught. But I was staggered and sickened by the fact that most of my friends were rejoiced at her downfall.

I do not remember anything that gave more genuine joy to the town than the relapse of this wretched girl into the slums from which she had been lifted. It was the occasion of general hilarity—this falling back of an immortal soul into Death—this terrible spectacle of a child staggering blindly from sunlight into shame. I was poked in the ribs facetiously. A perfect shower of chuckles fell on my ear. It was the joke of the season—this triumph of the Devil over the body of a girl. One mad young wag, who, with a keen nose for a joke, followed her into her haunts of crime, came back, his honest face convulsed with laughter, and bearing on his lips a statement from her, to the literal effect that “I was a d—d fool.”

I was staggered, I say, at the enjoyment created by the downfall of this girl. For myself, I can hardly imagine a more pitiful sight than her childish figure, as with face averted and hands raised, blinded by the white light of virtue and bewildered by her new condition, she slipped back in despair to her old shame. I may be a “d—d fool,” but I cannot find the heart to laugh at that.

212I don’t know how it is, but I have a mania for looking into cases of this sort. It is not philanthropy with me; it is a disease.

At the editorial desk, I sit opposite a young man of a high order of mind.

He makes it a point to compass the problems of nations. I dodge them. He has settled, to his own agreement, every European problem of the past decade. Those problems have settled me. He soars—I plod. Once in a while, when he yearns for a listener, he reaches down for my scalp, and lifts me up to his altitude, where I shiver and blink, until his talented fingers relax, and I drop home. It delights him to adjust his powerful mind to the contemplation of contending armies,—I swash around with the swarm that hangs about me.

His hero is Bismarck, that phlegmatic miracle that has yoked impulse to an ox, and having made a chess-board of Europe, plays a quiet game with the Pope. My hero is a blear-eyed sot, that having for four years waged a gigantic battle with drink, and alternated between watery Reform and positive Tremens, is now playing a vague and losing game with Spontaneous Combustion. My friend discusses Bismarck’s projects with a vastness of mind that actually makes his discourse dim, and I slip off to try my hero’s temper, and see whether I shall have him wind his intoxicated arms about my neck and envelop me in an atmosphere of whisky and reform, or fall recumbent in the gutter, his weak but honest face upturned to the sky, and his moist, white hand working vaguely upward from his placid breast, in token of abject surrender.

Bismarck is a bigger man than Bob.

But I can’t help thinking that Bob is engaged in the most thrilling and desperate conflict. Anyhow, I had rather see his watery eyes grow clear and his paroxysmal arms grow steadfast, than to see Bismarck wipe out every potentate in Europe. It’s a grave thing to watch the conflicts of kings, and see nations embattled rushing against each other. But there are greater and deeper conflicts 213waged in our midst every day, when the legions of Despair swarm against stout hearts, and Hunger and Suffering storm the citadel of human lives!

But I started to tell you of my new heroine.

Her name is Jane.

She presented herself one morning about three months ago. A trim, slender figure, the growth of nine years. It was such a small area of poverty that I felt capable of attending to it myself. But I remembered that small beggars usually represent productive but prostrated parents and a brood of children. The smaller the beggar the larger the family. I therefore summoned the good little woman who guides my household affairs.

She claims to be an expert in beggars. She has certain tests that she applies to all comers. Her fundamental rule is that all applicants are entitled to cold bread on first call. After this she either grades them up to cake and preserves, or holds them to scraps. I remember that she kept Col. Nash on dry biscuit for thirteen months, while other applicants have gone up to pie in three visits. I never felt any hesitation in taking her judgment after that, for of all wheedling mendicants Col. Nash, the alleged scissors-grinder, takes the lead.

But Jane was not a beggar. She carried on her arm a basket. It was filled with some useless articles that she wanted to sell. Would the lady look at them? Oh! of course! They were bits of splints embroidered with gay worsted. What were they for? Why, she didn’t know. She just thought somebody would buy them, and she needed some money so badly.

“Who is your mother?”

“I haven’t any. She is dead. I have a father, though.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s sick most of the time. He works when he is well.”

“What’s his name?”

“Robert ——!”

(Saints! My “Bob!” Sick indeed! The weak rascal!)

214Jane was asked in, and I began to investigate. I learned that this child was literally alone in the world. She had a sister, a puny two-year-old, and a drunken father—my flabby friend. They lived in a rickety hovel, out of which the last chair had been sold to pay rent. The mother, a year an invalid, had been accustomed to work little trifles in splints and worsted. She dying, the child picked up the splints, and worked grotesque baby fancies in wood and worsted. She had no time for weeping. Her hunger dried her eyes. The cooing baby by her side, crying for bread, made her forget the dead mother. So she fashioned the splints together, and with a brave heart went out to sell them.

Bob reformed at the bedside of his dying wife. Possibly at that moment the angels that had come to guide the woman home swept away the mist of the man’s debauch, and gave him a glimpse of the pure life that lay behind. Certain it is that his moist, uncertain hands crept vaguely up the cover till they caught the wasted cheeks of his wife, and his shaggy head bent down till his quivering lips found hers. And the poor wife, yielding once more to the love that had outlived shame and desertion, turned her eyes from her children and fixed them on her husband. Ah! how this earthly hope and this earthly love chased even the serenity of Heaven from her face, and lighted it with tender rapture! How quickly this drunkard supplanted God in the dying woman’s soul? “Oh, Bob! my darling!” she gasped, and raising her face toward him with a masterful yearning, she died.

“Mother didn’t seem to know we were there after father came,” Jane told me. And I wondered if the child had not been hurt, that all her months of patient love and watching had been forgotten in a tempest of love for a vagabond husband that had wrought nothing but disaster and death.

After the funeral, through which he went in a dazed sort of stupor, Bob got drunk, I don’t know why or how. He seemed tenderer since then than before. I noticed that he reformed oftener and got over it quicker. A piece of 215crape that Jane had fixed about his hat seemed to possess sacred properties to him. When he touched it and swore abstinence, he generally held out two or three days. One night, as he lay in the gutter, a cow, full of respect for his person, and yet unable to utterly control her hunger, chewed his hat. Since then he seemed to have lost his moorings, and drifted about on a currentless drunk.

He was always kind to Jane and the little biddie. In his maudlin way he would caress them, and cry over them, and reform with them, and promise to work for them. Even when he ate their last crust of bread, he accompanied the action with a sort of fumbling pomposity that robbed it of its horror. He never did it without promising to go out at once and bring back a sack of flour. Once he went so high as to promise four sacks. So that the child, in love like her mother with the old rascal, and like her mother fresh always in faith, was rather rejoiced than otherwise when he ate the bread. Did he bring the flour?

“Why, how could he? They had to bring him home. So of course I did not blame him. Poor father!”

I must do Bob the justice to say that he never earned a cent in all these days that he did not intend giving to Jane. Of course he never did it, but I desire him to have the credit of his intention. If the Lord held the best of us strictly to performance and ruled out intention, we wouldn’t be much better in his sight than Bob is in ours.

One day I was sitting behind a window looking at Jane, who stood in the kitchen door. Her oldish-looking, chipper little face was turned straight to me. It was a pretty face. The brown eyes were softened with suffering, and fear and anxiety had driven all color from her thin cheeks. I noticed that her mouth was never still. Though she was alone and silent, her lips quivered and trembled all the time. At times they would break into a dumb sob. Then she would draw them firmly together. Again they would twitch convulsively in the terrible semblance of a smile. Then in that pretty, feminine way she would pucker them together.

216Long suffering had racked the child until she was all awry, and her nerves were plunging through her tender frame like devils.

“Jane, were you ever hungry?”

“Sir!” and she started painfully, while her starved heart managed to send a thin coating of scarlet into her cheeks. She was a proud little body, and never talked of her sorrows.

May the Lord forgive me for repeating the question!

“Sometimes, sir, when I couldn’t sell anything. Last Saturday we had only some bread for dinner. We never had anything else until Sunday night. I wouldn’t have minded it then, but Mary cried so for bread that I went out, and a lady that I knew gave me some things.”

Now, think of that. From a crust at Saturday noon, on nothing till Sunday night. Of all the abundant marketing of Saturday evening; of all the luxuries of Sunday breakfast and dinner, not a crumb for this poor child. While we were dressing our children for their trip to Sunday-school, or their romp over the hills, this poor child, gnawed by hunger, deserted by her drunken father, holding a starving baby, sat crouched in a hovel, given up to despair and hopelessness. And that, too, within the sound of the bells that made the church-steeples thrill with music, and called God’s people to church!

A friend who had heard Jane’s story had given me three dollars for her. I gave it to her, and told her that as her rent was paid, she could with this lay in some provisions. She was crying then, but she dried her tears and hurried off.

“Will you please come here and look?” called a lady whose call I always obey, about an hour afterward.

I went, and there stood Jane, flushed and happy.

“I declare I am astonished at this child!” said the lady.

And therewith she displayed Jane’s purchases. A 217little meal and meat had been sent home. The rest she had with her. First, there was a goblet of strained honey; then a bundle of candy “for baby,” a package of tea “for father,” and a chip straw hat, with three gayly colored ribbons, “for herself.” And that’s where the money had gone!

“I am just put out with her,” said the arbitress of my affairs, after Jane had gathered up her treasures and departed. “To waste her money like that! I can imagine how the poor, half-starved child couldn’t help buying the honey-goblet; I should die myself if I didn’t have something sweet; but how she came to buy that hat and ribbons I can’t see!”

Ah, blue-eyed woman! There’s a yearning in the feminine soul stronger than hunger. There’s a passion there that starvation cannot conquer. The hat and ribbons were bought in response to that craving. The hat, I’ll bet thee, was bought before the honey,—aye, before the meal or meat. “Can’t understand it?” Then, my spouse, I’ll explain: Jane is a woman!

I must confess that I was pleased at the misdirection of Jane’s funds. Have you ever had a child deep in a long-continued stupor from fever? How delighted you were then when, tempted by some trifle, he gave signs of eagerness! So I was rejoiced to see that the long years of suffering had not crushed hope and emotion out of this girl’s life.

The tea and the candy showed that her affections, working up to the father and drawn to the baby, were all right. The honey gave evidence that the fresh impulses of childhood had not been nipped and chilled. The hat and ribbons—best and most hopeful purchase of all—proved that the womanly vanity and love of prettiness still fluttered in her young soul. Nothing is so charming and so feminine in woman as the passion for dress. Laugh at it as we may, I think that men will agree that there is nothing so pathetic as a young woman out of whom all hope of fine appearance has been pressed. A 218gay ribbon is the sign in which woman conquers. I wager that Eve made a neat, many-colored thing of fig-leaves.

But to return to Jane.

I know that this desultory sketch should be closed with something unusual. Jane should die or get married. But she’s too young for either. And so her life is running on ever. She plods the streets as she used to do. She has quit selling the flaming scraps she used to sell, and now knits her young but resolute brow over crochet work, which she sells at marvelous prices. Her path is flecked with more sunshine than ever before, and at Sunday-school she is as smart a little woman as can be seen. If the shadow of a staggering figure, that falls so often across her course, could be lifted, she would have little else to grieve over. Not that she complains of this—not a bit of it. “Poor father is sick so much. How can he be expected to work?” And so she goes on, with her woman’s nature clinging to him closer than ever; even as the ivy clings to the old ruin. Hiding his shame from the world, wrapping him in the plenitude of her faith, and binding up his shattered resolves with her heart-strings.

And as for Bob:

I am strongly tempted to tell a lie, and say that he is either sober or dead. But he is neither. He is the same shiftless, irresponsible fellow that I have known for three years. His face is heavier, his eyes are smaller, his nose redder, his flesh more moist than ever. But in the depth of his debauch there seems to have been winged some idea of the excellence of Jane’s life, and the fineness of her martyrdom. He catches me anywhere he sees me, and, falling on my shirt-front, weeps copious tears of praise and pop-skull, while talking of her. He swears by her.

By the way, I must do him justice. Yesterday he came to me very much affected. He was white-lipped, and trembling, and hungry. He had spent the night in the gutter, and the policeman who was scattering the disinfecting lime, either careless or wise beyond his kind, had powdered him all over. He seemed to be terribly in earnest. 219He raised his trembling hand to his hat and touched the place where the crape used to be, and swore that he intended to reform, for good and all. “S’elp me Jane!” he said.

I have not seen him since. I hope that the iron has at last entered his soul and will hold him steadfast. Ha! that sounds like him stumbling up the steps now. Hey! he has rolled back to the bottom! Here he comes again. That must be him. “Of course!”

I AM proud of my acquaintance with Dobbs.

He was a hero, whose deeds were not spread upon any of the books of men, but whose martyrdom I am sure illustrates a glowing page in God’s great life book.

I met him late one night.

The paper, with its burden of news and gossip, had just been put to press, and I strolled out of the hot, clanking room to catch a sight of the cool morning stars, and a whiff of the dew-laden breezes of the dawn.

Silhouetted against the intercepted stars, I saw a tall and striking form, standing like a statue on the corner.

As I came out of the door the figure approached.

“Is this the Herald office, sir?”

“Yes, sir. Can I serve you in any way?”

“Well—” hesitating for an instant, and then speaking boldly and sharply, “I wanted to know if you could not trust me for a few papers?”

“I suppose so; walk in to the light.”

I shall never forget the impression Dobbs made on me that night, as we two walked in from the starlight to the glare of the gas-burners.

A BLAZE OF HONESTY.

As I have said before, he had a tall and striking figure. His face was ugly. He was ungraceful, ragged, and uncouth. Yet there was a splendid glow of honesty that shone from every feature, and challenged your admiration. It was not that cheap honesty that suffuses the face of your average honest man; but a vivid burst of light that, fed by principle, sent its glow from the heart. It was not the 221passive honesty that is the portion of men who have no need to steal, but the triumphant honesty that has grappled with poverty, with disease, with despair, and conquered the whole devil’s brood of temptation; the honesty that has been sorely tried, the honesty of martyrdom; the honesty of heroism. He was the honestest man I ever knew.

THE PATHOS OF INCONGRUITY.

There was one feature of his dress that was pathetic in its uniqueness. He wore a superb swallow-tail dress-coat; a gorgeous coat, which was doubtless christened at some happy wedding (his father’s, I suppose); had walked side by side with dainty laces; been swept through stately quadrilles, pressed upon velvet, and to-night came to me upon a shirtless back, and asked “trust” for a half-dozen newspapers.

It had that seedy, threadbare look which makes broadcloth, after its first season, the most melancholy dress that sombre ingenuity ever invented. It was scrupulously brushed and buttoned close up to the chin, whether to hide the lack of a shirt, I never in the course of six months’ intimate acquaintance had the audacity to inquire. In the sleeve, on which rosy wrists had, in days gone by, laid in loving confidence, a shriveled arm hung loosely, and from its outlet three decrepit fingers driveled. His hat was old, and fell around his ears.

His breeches, of a whitish material, which had the peculiarity of leaving the office perfectly dirty one evening and coming back pure and clean the next morning. What amount of midnight scrubbing this required from my hero Dobbs, I will not attempt to tell. Neither will I guess how he became possessed of that wonderful coat. Whether in the direst days of the poverty which had caught him, his old mother, pitying her boy’s rags, had fished it up from the bottom of a trunk where, with mayhaps an orange-wreath or a bit of white veil, it had lain for years, the last token of a happy bridal night, and, baptizing it with her 222tears, had thrown it around his bare shoulders, I cannot tell. All I know is, that taken in connection with the rest of his attire, it was startling in its contrast; and that I honored the brave dignity with which he buttoned this magnificent coat against his honest rags, and strode out to meet the jeers of the world and work out a living.

FIVE DOLLARS A WEEK.

I knew Dobbs for six months! Day after day I saw him come at three o’clock in the morning. I saw his pale face, and that coat so audacious in its fineness, go to the press-room, fold his papers, and hurry out into the weather. One night I stopped him.

“Dobbs,” says I, “how much do you make a week?”

“I average five dollars and twenty cents, sir. I have twenty-seven regular customers. I get the paper at fifteen cents a week from you, and sell it to them at twenty-five cents. I make two dollars and seventy cents off of them, and then I sell about twenty-five extra papers a morning.”

“What do you do with your money?”

“It takes nearly all of it to support me and mother.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that you and your mother live on five dollars and twenty cents a week?”

“Yes, sir, we do, and pay five dollars a month rent out of that. We live pretty well, too,” with a smile, possibly induced by the vision of some of those luxuries which were included under the head of “living pretty well.” I was crushed!

Five dollars and twenty-five cents a week! The sum which I waste per week upon cigars. The paltry amount which I pay almost any night at the theater. The sum that I spend any night I may chance to strike a half-dozen boon companions. This sum, so contemptible to me—wasted so lightly—I find to be the sum total of the income of a whole family—the whole support of two human beings.

I left Dobbs, humiliated and crushed. I pulled my hat over my eyes, strolled down to Mercer’s, and bought a 223twenty-five cent cigar and sat down to think over my duty in the premises.

... One morning the book-keeper of the Herald, to whom my admiration for Dobbs was well known (I having frequently delivered glowing lectures upon his character from the mailing table to an audience of carriers, clerks, and printers), approached me and with a devilish smack of joy in his voice, says:

“I am afraid your man Dobbs is a fraud. Some time ago he persuaded the clerk to give him credit on papers. He ran up a bill of about seven dollars, and then melted from our view. We have not seen or heard of him since—expect he’s gone to trading with the Constitution now, to bilk them out of a bill.”

This looked bad—but somehow or other I still had a firm faith in my hero. God had written “honesty” too plain in his face for my confidence in him to be shaken. I knew that if he had sinned or deceived, that it was starvation or despair that had driven him to it, and I forgave him even before I knew he was guilty....

About a week after this happened, a bombazine female—one of those melancholy women that occasionally arise like some Banquo’s ghost in my pathway, and always, I scarce know why, put remorse to twitching at my heart-strings—came into my sanctum and asked for me.

“I am the mother,” says she, in a voice which sorrow (or snuff) had filled with tears and quavers—“of Mr. Dobbs, a young man who used to buy papers from you. He left owing you a little, and asked me to see you about it.”

“Left? Where has he gone?”

“To heaven, I hope, sir! He is dead!”

“Dead?”

A CONSCIENTIOUS DEBTOR.

“Yes, sir; my poor boy went last Thursday. He were all I had on earth, but he suffered so it seemed like a mercy 224to let him go. He were worried to the last about a debt he was owin’ of you. He said you had been clever to him, and would think hard ef he didn’t pay you. He wanted you to come and see him so he could explain as how he were took down with the rheumatizum, but that were no one to nuss him while I come for you. He had owin’ to him when he were took, about three dollars, which he have an account of in this little book. He told me with his last breath to cullect this money, and not to use a cent tell I had paid you, and if I didn’t git enough, to turn you over the book. I hev took in one dollar and tirty cents, and”—with the air of one who has fought the good fight—“here it is!” So saying, she ran her hand into a gash in the bombazine, which looked like a grievous wound, and pulled out one of those long cloth purses that always reminded me of the entrails of some unfortunate dead animal, and counted out the money. This she handed me with the book.

I ran my eye over the ruggedly kept accounts and found that each man owed from a dime up to fifty cents.

“Why, madam,” says I, “these accounts are not worth collecting.”

“That’s what he was afraid of,” says she, moving toward a bundle that lay upon the floor; “he told me if you said so, to give you this, and ask you to sell it if you could, and make your money. It’s all he had, sir, or me, either, and he wouldn’t die easy ’til I told him I wud do it! God knows”—and the tears rolled down her thin and hollow cheeks—“God knows it were a struggle to promise to give it up. He wore it, and his father before him. How many times it has covered ’em both! I had hoped to carry it to the end with me, and wrap my old body in it when I died. But it was all we had which was fine, and he wouldn’t rest ’til I told him I wud give it to you. Then he smiled as pert-like as a child, and kissed me, and says, ‘Now I am ready to go!’ He were a good boy, sir, as ever lived”—and she rocked her old body to and fro with her grief. Need I say that she had offered me the old dress-coat? 225That sacred garment, blessed with the memory of her son and his father, and which, rather than give up, she would willingly pluck either of the withered arms that hung at her sides from its socket!

I dropped my eyes to the account book again—for what purpose I am not ashamed that the reader may guess.

In a few moments I spoke:

“Madam, I was mistaken in the value of these accounts; most of the debtors on this book, I find upon a second look, are capitalists. The $11 worth of accounts will sell for $12 anywhere. Your son owed me $7. Leave the book with me; I will pay myself, and here is $5 balance which I hand to you. Your son was a good boy, and I feel honored that I can serve his mother.”

She folded the old coat up and departed.

I kept the book.

It was a simple record of Dobbs’s life. Here ran his expense list—a dreary trickle of “bacon” and “meal” and “rent,” enlivened only once with “sugar”; a saccharine suggestion that I am unable to account for, as it surely did not comport with either of the staples that formed the basis of his life. Probably, on some grand occasion, he and his mother ate it in the lump.

Here were his accounts, of say fifty cents each, on men accounted responsible in the world’s eye—accounts for papers furnished through snow, and sleet, and rain! Some of them showed signs of having been called for a dozen times, being frescoed with such notes as “Call Tuesday,” “Call Wednesday,” “Call Thursday,” etc.

On another page was a pathetic list of delusive liniments and medicines, with which he had attacked his stubborn disease. Such as, “King of Pane—kored a man in Maryetti in 2 days, $1.00”; “Magic Linament—kores in 10 minnits, $2.00 a bottel”; and so on through the whole catalogue of snares which the patent office turns out year after year. Poor fellow! the only relief he got from his racking pains was when God laid his healing hand on him.

I shall keep the book as long as I live.

226In its thumbed and greasy leaves is written the record of a heroism more lofty and a martyrdom more lustrous than ever lit the page of book before or since.

I think I shall have it printed in duplicate, and scattered as leaven throughout the lumpy Sunday-school libraries of the land.

“HE has been at that for thirteen years.”

And the speaker laughed as he watched an old man gathering up a bucket of stones and broken bricks. The old man continued his work until his bucket was filled, and then started back toward Spring Street, stopping on the way to resurrect a rusted old hoop that was nearly buried in the gutter.

After walking about three blocks he stopped at the corner of Spring and James streets, and laying the rusty hoop carefully upon a great heap of hoops of all kinds and sizes, he carried the bucket to the back of his lot, a part of which was considerably lower than the front, and emptied the bucketful of bricks and stones.

He was a very old man—about seventy years old, apparently—in his shirt-sleeves, and wearing a dingy straw hat. He was feeble, too, and his steps were slow, but he stopped only to get a drink of water at the back door, and then ambled off with the empty bucket.

The little frame structure is half store and half residence. Just inside the door to the store sat a portly old lady of sixty or thereabouts. “Who is that old man yonder with that empty bucket?”

“Him! Why that’s old man Lewis Powell, and he’s my husband. I thought everybody knowed him.”

“Is that all he does?”

“Fill up the lot, you mean? No, no, he puts hoops on barrels and kegs, and raises calves and such like, but that’s his main business. He’s been at it now for nigh on to fourteen years.”

“And how much has he filled in?”

“Oh, from the sidewalk on back. The lot is fifty by 228eighty, and it used to be just one big hole. Now here on Spring Street where the front is, the bank went nearly straight down ’cause the eye of the sewer was right there. Then the sewer was open and run in a gully the whole length of the lot, and just about in the middle of the lot. Here on James Street, at the side there, it wasn’t so steep. The front of the old house was about half-way down the bank, and the pillars at the back was over ten feet high. The house wasn’t more’n twelve feet that way, either, so you can tell how steep it was. And right at the back door the sewer passed.”

“How deep was it?”

“Well, right here at the front the city men measured to the sewer once, and it was a little over twenty feet below the sidewalk. The back of the lot was a little lower. It was one big hole fifty by eighty, and almost in the bottom of it was the old house.”

“Fourteen years ago.”

“Fourteen years ago we bought it from Jack Smith on time. It wasn’t much, but me and Jenny and Joe and Stella just buckled down and worked like tigers. The neighbors made fun of us at first, and even the niggers thought it was funny. Now, I aint telling you this because I’m stuck up about it, but it just shows what the Powell family has done, and it shows what any poor folks can do if they just stick at it.”

“Didn’t the old man help?”

“Yes, a little. But we had to live, and then he spent lots of his time a-fillin’ up, so the brunt of the money part fell on me and the children. We bought the mudhole, and he made the mudhole what it is now. Right here where the mudhole was there is a corner lot, and them what used to laugh at us would like mighty well to own it now.”

And the old lady smiled as though the thought was a very pleasant one.

“Yes, sir,” she continued, “it’s worth a good deal now, and the first thing you know, when the streets get paved along here, it will be worth a lot more than it is now.”

229“And the old man?”

“The old man has worked mighty faithful. Little at a time he has fetched dirt, and rocks, and bricks, and trash. Then the city put a pipe there for the sewer, and he begun at the sidewalk on Spring Street and filled back. The bank kept getting further and further, and after, I don’t know how long, we built this little house on the filled-in part. The old man kept fillin’ back till we’ve got a pretty big back yard; and there’s only a little part left to fill back there. You see, he never tore up the old house—the patchwork palace of ’77—just throwed in around it and in it till he has almost buried it.”

“Why?”

“Oh, it’s just a notion of his. He didn’t want to see the old house tore up, and there it is now, with just the roof stickin’ out. In a little while it will be one level yard, fifty by eighty, and a corner lot, too. And by the time it all gets filled up—well, me and the old man is gettin’ feeble now, and we won’t last much longer. But, now that we are all out of debt, and just enough left to do to keep the old man’s hand in, it does me good to think of that old mudhole, and how we had to save and slave and pinch to pay for it. And I think the old man likes to stand there at the corner and look back how level and smooth it is, and think how it was done, a handful at a time, through the rain and the snow and the sunshine. Fourteen years! It was a big job, but we stuck to it, and I’m restin’ now, for my work is done. The old man don’t work like he used to, but he says his job aint finished yet, and he keeps fillin’ up.”

“And when his work is done—”

“Then he’ll rest, too.”

THE Threatened Destruction of the Simple Faith of the Fathers by the Vain Deceits of Modern Philosophers.—An Attack Christians Must Meet.

New York, January 26.—The dread of the times, as I see it, is the growing skepticism in the leading circles of thought and action throughout the country—a swelling tide of atheism and unbelief that has already swept over the outposts of religion.

I am not alarmed by the fact that Henry Ward Beecher shook hands with Ingersoll on a public stand, and has since swung beyond the limit of orthodoxy, any more than I am reassured by the fact that Stephen H. Tyng has, by indorsing the miracles at Lourdes, swung back into the stronghold of superstition. These are mere personal expressions that may mean much or little. They may be classed with the complaint of Dr. Talmage that he found religion dead in a circuit of 3000 miles of travel last year, which complaint is balanced by the assertion of Dr. Hall that the growth of religious sentiment was never so decisive as at present.

I have noted, in the first place, that the latter-day writers—novelists, scientists and essayists—are arraying themselves in great force either openly on the side of skepticism, or are treating religious sentiment with a readiness of touch and lack of reverence, that is hardly less dangerous. I need not run over the lists of scientists, beginning with Tyndall, Huxley and Stephens, that have raised the banner of negation—nor recount the number of 231novelists who follow the lead of sweet George Eliot, this sad and gentle woman, who allied sentiment to positivism so subtly, and who died with the promise on her lips that her life would “be gathered like a scroll in the tomb, unread forever”—who said that she “wanted no future that broke the ties of the past,” and has gone to meet the God whose existence she denied. We all know that within the past twenty years there has been an alarming increase of atheism among the leading writers in all branches. But it is the growth of skepticism among the people that has astonished me.

I am not misled by the superb eloquence of Ingersoll nor the noisy blasphemy of his imitators. I was with five journalists, and I found that every one of them were skeptics, two of them in the most emphatic sense. In a sleeping-car with eight passengers, average people I take it, I found that three were confirmed atheists, three were doubtful about it, and two were old-fashioned Christians. A young friend of mine, a journalist and lecturer, asked me a few months ago what I thought of his preparing a lecture that would outdo Ingersoll—his excuse being that he found Ingersoll so popular. I asked Henry Watterson once what effect Ingersoll’s lectures had on the Louisville public. “No more than a theatrical representation,” was the quick reply. Watterson was wrong. I have never seen a man who came away from an Ingersoll lecture as stout of faith and as strong in heart as he was when he went there.

I do not know that this spirit of irreligion and unbelief has made much inroad on the churches. It is as yet simply eating away the material upon which the churches must recruit and perpetuate themselves. There is a large body of men and women, the bulk probably of our population, that is between the church and its enemies; not members of the church or open professors of religion, they have yet had reverence for the religious beliefs, have respected the rule of conscience, and believed in the existence of one Supreme Being. These men and women have 232been useful to the cause of religion, in that they held all the outposts about the camp of the church militant, and protected it with enwrapping conservatism and sympathy. It is this class of people that are now yielding to the assaults of the infidel. Having none of the inspiration of religion, and possessing neither the enthusiasm of converts nor the faith of veterans, they are easily bewildered and overcome. It is a careless and unthinking multitude on which the atheists are working, and the very inertia of a mob will carry thousands if the drift of the mass once floats to the ocean. And the man or woman who rides on the ebbing tide goes never to return. Religious beliefs once shattered are hardly mended. The church may reclaim its sinners, but its skeptics, never.

It is not surprising that this period of critical investigation into all creeds and beliefs has come. It is a logical epoch, come in its appointed time. It is one of the penalties of progress. We have stripped all the earth of mystery, and brought all its phenomena under the square and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the Eternal, and pitched its crucible for an analysis of the soul. It was natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine—a vastness and vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have fathomed its uttermost secret; felt its most secret pulse, girdled it with steel, harnessed it and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery is now demonstrated; what was vague is now apparent. Science has dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made plain all that was vague on earth, and reduced every mystery to demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last having reduced all the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored every theory to a fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself, and warn the world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul. The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a 233shore that was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its builders as the shores of a star that lights the space beyond our vision are to us to-day; the Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the centuries that look through his dreamy eyes have lost all sense of wonder; ships that were freighted from the heart of Africa lie in our harbor, and our market-places are vocal with more tongues than bewildered the builders at Babel; a letter slips around the earth in ninety days, and the messages of men flash along the bed of the ocean; we tell the secrets of the universe as a woman tells her beads, and the stars whirl serenely through orbits that science has defined; we even read of the instant when the comet that plunged in dim illimitable distance, where even the separate stars are lost in mist and vapor, shall whirl again into the vision of man, a wanderer that could not shake off the inexorable supervision of science, even in the chill and measureless depths of the universe. Fit time is this, then, for science to make its last and supreme assault—to challenge the last and supreme mystery—defy the last and supreme force. And the church may gird itself for the conflict! As the Pope has said, “It is no longer a rebel that threatens the church. It is a belligerent!” It is no longer a shading of creed. It is the upsettal of all creeds that is attempted.

It is impossible to conceive the misery and the blindness that will come in the wake of the spreading atheism. The ancients witnessed the fall of a hundred creeds, but still had a hundred left. The vast mystery of life hung above them, but was lit with religions that were sprinkled as stars in its depths. From a host of censers was their air made rich with fragrance, and warmed from a field of altars. No loss was irreparable. But with us it is different. We have reached the end. Destroy our one belief and we are left hopeless, helpless, blind. Our air will be odorless, chill, colorless. Huxley, the leader of the positivists, himself confesses—I quote from memory: “Never, in the history of man, has a calamity so terrific befallen the race, as this advancing deluge, black with destruction, uprooting our 234most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation.” And yet Mr. Huxley urges on this deluge with furious energy. The aggressiveness of the atheists is inexplicable to me. Why they should insist on destroying a system that is pure and ennobling, when they have nothing to replace it with; why they should shatter a faith that colors life, only to leave it colorless; why they should rob life of all that makes life worth living; why they should take away the consolation that lifts men and women from the despair of bereavement and desolation, or the light that guides the feet of struggling humanity, or the hope that robs even the grave of its terror,—why they should do all this, and then stand empty-handed and unresponsive before the yearning and supplicating people they have stripped of all that is precious, is more than I can understand. The best atheist, to my mind, that I ever knew, was one who sent his children to a convent for their education. “I cannot lift the blight of unbelief from my own mind,” he said, “but it shall never fall upon the minds of my children if I can help it. As for me, I would give all I have on earth for the old faith that I wore so lightly and threw off so carelessly.”

The practical effects of the growth of atheism are too terrible to contemplate. A vessel on an unknown sea that has lost its rudder and is tossed in a storm—that’s the picture. It will not do for Mr. Ingersoll to say that a purely human code of right and wrong can be established to which the passions of men can be anchored and from which they can swing with safety. It will not do for him to cite his own correct life or the correct lives of the skeptical scientists, or of leading skeptics, as proof that unbelief does not bring license. These men are held to decency by a pride of position and by a sense of special responsibility. It is the masses that atheism will demoralize and debauch. It is thousands of simple men and women, who, loosed of the one restraint that is absolute and imperious, will drift upon the current of their passions, colliding 235everywhere, and bringing confusion and ruin. The vastly greatest influence that religion has exercised, as far as the world goes, has been the conservative pressure that it has put upon the bulk of the people, who are outside of the church. With the pressure barely felt and still less acknowledged, it has preserved the integrity of society, kept the dangerous instincts within bounds, repressed savagery, and held the balance. Conscience has dominated men who never confessed even to themselves its power, and the dim, religious memories of childhood, breathing imperceptibly over long wastes of sin and brutality, have dissolved clouds of passion in the souls of veterans. Atheism will not work its full effect on this class of men. Even after they have murdered conscience by withholding the breath upon which it lives, its ghost will grope through the chambers of their brain, menacing and terrible, and to the last,—

It is on the young men and women—the generation bred in the chill atmosphere of unbelief—that atheism will do its worst. With no traditions in which to guide their faith, no altar before which they can do reverence, no ideal to which their eyes can turn, no standard lofty enough to satisfy, or steadfast enough to assure—with no uplifting that is not limited, no aspiration that has wings, and no enthusiasm that is not absurd—with life but a fever that kindles in the cradle and dies in the grave,—truly atheism meets youth with a dread prospect, sullen, storm-swept, hopeless.

In the conflict that is coming, the church is impregnable, because the church is right; because it is founded on a rock. The scientists boast that they have evolved everything logically from the first particles of matter; that from the crystal rock to sentient man is a steady way, marked by natural gradations. They even say that, if a new bulk were thrown off from the sun to-morrow it would spin into the face of the earth, and the same development 236that has crowned the earth with life would take place in the new world. And yet Tyndall says: “We have exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, and yet a mighty mystery looms up before us.” And this mystery is the kindling of the atoms of the brain with the vital spark. There science is baffled, for there is the supreme force that is veiled eternally from the vision of man.

The church is not bound to the technicalities of argument in this contest. It has the perfect right to say, and say logically, that something must rest on faith—that there must be something in the heart or soul before conviction can be made perfect. Just as we cannot impress with the ecstasies and transports of earthly love a man who has never loved, or paint a rainbow to a man who has never seen. And yet the time has passed when religion can dismiss the skeptic with a shriek or a sneer. I read one little book a year ago, gentle, firm, decisive; a book that demonstrated the necessity and existence of the Supreme Being, as clearly and as closely as a mathematical proposition was worked out. But the strength of the church is, after all, the high-minded consistency of its members; the warmth and earnestness of its evangelism; the purity and gentleness of its apostles. If the creeds are put at peace, and every man who wears the Christian armor will go forth to plead the cause of the meek and lowly Nazarene, whose love steals into the heart of man as the balm of flowers into the pulses of a summer evening—then we shall see the hosts of doubt and skepticism put to rout.

Of course I have no business to write all this. It is the province of the preachers to talk of these things, and many no doubt will resent as impertinent even the suggestion of a worldling. And yet it seems so sure to me that in the swift and silent marshaling of the hosts of unbelief and irreligion there is presaged the supremest test that the faith of Christians has ever undergone, that I felt impelled to write. There are men, outside of the active workers of the church, who have all reverence for its institutions and love for its leaders; whose hearts are stirred now and then 237by a faith caught at a mother’s knee, or the memory of some rapt and happy moment; who want to live, if not in the fold of the chosen, at least in the shadow of the Christian sentiment, and among the people dominated by Christian faith; and who hope to die at last, in the same trust and peace that moved the dying Shakespeare—wisest, sweetest mind ever clothed in mortal flesh—when he said: “I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting.”

A VERY TALL STORY.—THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS.—A SIDE VIEW OF SEA-SICKNESS.—THE SIGHT OF THE OCEAN.—LAND AT LAST AND GLAD OF IT.

Philadelphia, Feb. 20, 1876.—The ocean is a greatly exaggerated affair. About four years ago, my friend Charles I. Graves and myself were sitting on a country fence, in Floyd County, after the manner of lizards, drinking in the sunshine, when a wagon containing a small box wheeled past us. It had hardly got abreast us when my friend dropped from his comfortable perch as if he were shot, and rushed to the wagon. Then ensued a remarkable scene. You have all seen a well-bred country dog meet a city dog on some green highway. You know with what hurried circumspection he smells the stranger at all points. So did my friend approach the little square box on the wagon. He sniffed at it as if “he would draw his soul through his nose.” I examined the ugly little box closely. It was marked

To Mr. Berckmans,

Mont Alto, Near Rome,

Ga., U.S.A.

It was Rhenish wine shipped from Paris.

My friend explained to me, after his rhapsody was over, that the box having been brought across the ocean in the hold of a steamer, retained a subtle scent of bilge-water, that brought the sea with all its dangerous fascination back 239to him—he having served all his young life before the mast. He was, at this writing, a plain, staid farmer, content among his cattle and clover. And yet that sharp, briny, saline flavor, thrown on the bosom of the still country breeze, put a restless devil in his breast. It was as if a born gallant, exiled for a decade to the heart of some desert, should, near the expiration of his sentence, stumble upon a cambric handkerchief, redolent with the perfume of a lady’s boudoir. In less than two years after the sight or rather the smell of that box my friend had sold his plantation, convinced his wife, and gone to the ocean again. Had Dr. Berckmans been content to drink native wine, Mr. Graves would yet be alternating cotton with clover, in the peaceful valley of the Etowah.

After this strong proof of the fascination that the sea has for its votaries, I achieved a strong desire to try it for myself. It renewed in my mature days the wild ambition that put turmoil into my schoolboy life, after I had read “Lafitte, or the Pirate of the Gulf.”

I have longed for many a day to run a “gore” into each leg of my pantaloons, roll back my collar, tousle my hair, fold my cloak about my shoulders, and stand before the mast in a stiff breeze, and there read Byron with one eye, and with the other watch the effect of the tableau on the female passengers.

I never had a chance to gratify the desire until lately. I never saw the ocean until the trip that results in this letter; I shall never forget the impression it made on me.

I had imagined that it would be a moment of ecstasy. I had believed that my soul, in the glad recognition of something as infinite, as illimitable as itself, would laugh with joy, and leap to my lips, and burn in my fingers, and tingle in my veins. I wisely reserved the first sight until we had steamed out beyond the land, and then with the air of one who unchains himself, I raised my head and looked out to the future. There, as far as the eye could reach, aye, and way beyond, as if mocking the finiteness of sight, stretched the blue waters. Ah! how my fine-spun 240fancies crumbled and came tumbling back on me in dire confusion! My soul literally shriveled! My very imagination was cowed and driven to its corner, and I sat there dumb and trembling!

No tenant of a cradle was ever more simple or more trusting than I became at that moment. I literally rejoiced in the abrogation of all the pride and manliness that I had boasted of two hours before. I flung away my self-dependence, and my soul ran abashed into the hollow of His hand, even as a frightened child runs to its father’s arms. As I looked shuddering upon the vast and restless waste of waters in front of me, I felt as if some person had taken me to the confines of that time which human calculation can compass, and holding me on the chill edge of that gulf called the Eternal, had asked me to translate its meaning, and pronounce its uttermost boundary.

I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was about scared to death; certain it is that I crouched there for hours, trembling, and yet gazing out beyond me upon the lapping waters, from where they parted before our ship to where they curled up against the half-consenting sky! At last I arose, shook myself, as if throwing off some nightmare, and sought the crowd again.

I can never forget how dissonant and inopportune the flippant conversation of the voyagers seemed to me to be at that time. It was as if some revelers should jest and shout in a great church. With the awful abyss in front, and these prattlers to the rear, one had the two extremes. There was God in the deep and awful stillness ahead, and the world behind in the chatter and gayety that rang out “like a man’s cracked laughter heard way down in hell.”

The first man’s voice that I heard, as I turned away from the solemn hush of the Eternal that yawned before us, was that of a young fellow who remarked to his chum rhapsodically (evidently alluding to some female acquaintance), “Why, she had a leg on her like a government mule.” These words bit into my memory as if they were cut there by white-hot pincers.

I believe I have said somewhere in this letter that my soul didn’t leap to my lips when I went out to meet the ocean. I regret to say that my breakfast did. I do not know whether any writer has addressed himself to sea-sickness. I am certain that no writer of sacred or profane literature can do it sufficient injustice. Walt Whitman might do it. He’s better on the yawp than any poet I know. Never tell me again that hell is a lake of fire and brimstone. Eternal punishment means riding on a rough sea, in a steamer that don’t roll well, without a copper-bottomed stomach, and a self-acting stop-valve in the throat. To have been jostled about in a lake of fire would have been real cheerful business compared to the unutterable anguish that I suffered for three days. I do believe that if I had tied a cannon-ball to a crumb of bread and swallowed them both, the crumb would have come prancing to the front again, and brought the cannon-ball with it. It at last became a sort of dismal joke to send anything down. But this was not what made it so hard to bear. It was the abject degradation that it brought upon me. The absolute prostration of every mental, moral and physical activity, of every emotion, impulse and ambition; the reduction of a system that boasted of some nervous power and of excessive tone, to the condition of a wet dish-clout,—these were the things that made sea-sickness a misery beyond the power of words. For three days I lay like an old volcano, still, desolate and haggard; but with an exceedingly active crater. I was brought to that condition which Chesterfield says is the finest pitch to which a gentleman can be brought, that sublime pitch of indifference that enables him to hear of the loss of an estate, or a poodle dog, with the same feeling. Nothing disturbs the man who is sea-sick. He blinks in the face of disaster, and yawps at death itself. He actually longs for sensation. To stick him with a pin, or drop ice down his back, would be a mercy. He spraddles madly over the ship, flabbing himself like a mollusk over everything 242he stumbles on, and knows not night or morning. As far as I was concerned, I was seized with a yawning that came very near proving fatal. I was taken with a longing to turn myself wrong-side outwards, and hang myself on the taffrail. Several times I was on the point of doing it; but I struggled against it and saved myself.

THE SIGHTS OF THE SEA.

The “sights” of the sea are not what they are cracked up to be. Some writer, Lowell, I believe, who was seduced into going seaward, had a sovereign contempt for everything connected with the sea. With a charming abandon, he says, “A whale looks like a brown paper parcel—the white stripes down his back resembling the pack-thread.” It is not hard to bring everything down to this standard.

The very motion of the waves, the cause of rhymes unnumbered, becomes terribly monotonous after the first day or two. The rise and relapse of the tinted water glistening in the sun, and blooming lilies on the wave-crest, is a pretty enough sight at first; but before long one longs to shiver the surface of the deep, and calm its eternal restlessness. The waves, wriggling up like a woman’s regrets from nowhere, come dragging themselves over the weary waste, and, plashing back upon each other, spring off on another uneasy remonstrance, until the brain of the looker-on is actually addled. I would have given a great deal to have had the power to have settled the upheaving waters for one hour, just as a schoolboy has the power, and the inclination, too, to break the inexorable calm of a mill-pond by splashing it with rocks. Nothing tires us like sameness; sameness, inactivity, is intolerable.

We saw some flying-fish. And we saw, what I valued much more, on board with us a man who knew a man whose cousin had seen the great sea-serpent. I have a great respect for a man who knows somebody that has seen the sea-serpent. He is a link between us and the supernatural in the ocean. He is a relic, stranded by the shore of science, of that world of wonders that began with the syrens, was 243modernized with the mermaids, and that ends in the devil-fish and sea-serpent. While he lives I want to be near him. When he dies I want his tooth set on my mantel-piece; it will be a sort of guarantee, under which I can read the weird stories of the old, unexplored ocean, that made boyhood joyous. Give me the sea-serpent as a fact, and I will swear to the mermaids, bet on the phantom ship, and pin my faith to the syrens.

THE LOVERS AND THE PILOT.

The intercourse between the passengers was not pleasant. We got tired of each other. The fact that none of us could get on or off, gave us a sort of feeling that we were prisoners; or, when locked up at night in our berths, that we were animals traveling in the same menagerie; brought together by chance, and held together through necessity.

There was one couple on board that won my attention. It was a man, full-grown, handsome and accomplished, but with the deep furrows in his brow that always come after a man has wrestled with the world; and the girl not more than fifteen years of age. The girl had not worn off the subtle bloom of childhood that gave her grace and glow, as the dew-chrism of early dawn graces the lily. She was not beautiful, after the approved models, but there was an elastic freshness, a bright charm that would have put beauty to the blush. She was brimming with the splendid and tender divinity that fills the odorous buds just before they burst into life’s beauty. She was full of spring. She carried its balms about with her, its aroma hung about her skirts, and its auroral light illuminated her very being. She was April, with all its joys and all its happy tears—its dear restlessness, and its thrills. I marveled to see how the man of affairs loved her. It annoyed me to see how this man, with all his vast concerns, his rugged schemes, his vaulting ambition, bowed down at the feet of a child. It was a very miracle of love that centered all the impulses, aspirations, hopes, and endeavors of this man of the world in a bright slip of a girl. She understood her power, too; 244and taking the reins of affairs in her little fingers, carried herself with a pretty imperiousness. Not always was she mistress, though. Once in awhile I noticed, when he held her beneath his words, her eyes softened and fell, and she sat half absorbed and trembling, thrilling under an ecstasy that stirred her soul to its very depths, and yet left her unconscious of what it meant or from what it came. I watched this couple with a strange interest, and my heart went out to the child. But beyond this there was nothing interesting on shipboard. The people were all tame. They seemed to have been planted on the ship, and grown there. They were all indigenous; and hence, when the pilot—a breezy fellow, by the way—jumped on board just outside of New York, he brought with him the charm of a rare exotic, and actually acquired a sort of game flavor, by being a stranger.

SOME CONCLUSIONS NOT JUMPED AT.

Altogether, a trip on the ocean is a very great bore. It does not compare to the cozy and bustling comforts of an inland trip, especially if one have the benefits of a Pullman.

The ocean is meant to be looked at and enjoyed—from the shore, or through books. You may see more of it by going on board a ship. It is pretty apt to see more of you, though, than you do of it. There are many moments during the first day or two, when, leaning over the taffrail, you yawp into its face, that it can see clear through to your boots. That’s the way it was with

AN ACCIDENTAL MEETING ON THE STREET, IN WHICH TWO GREAT MEN ARE RECOGNIZED AS THE TYPES OF TWO CLASHING THEORIES—TOOMBS’S SUCCESSES—BROWN’S JUDGMENT.

THE other day I saw two men meet on the street, bow cordially, and pass. I was struck by the contrast between them—by the difference in their walk, appearance and manner. This suggested that the contrast in their lives, in their lineage and their methods, was even greater than their physical make-up. And then, forgetting for the moment that a gubernatorial campaign of great fierceness was raging, I fell to wondering if there had ever been two masterful men whose paths lay near each other, and whose performance was so nearly equal, who had been born in such dissimilar conditions, and moved by such dissimilar motives. Joe Brown and Bob Toombs! Both illustrious and great—both powerful and strong—and yet at every point, and from every view, the perfect opposites of each other.

Through two centuries have two strains of blood, two conflicting lines of thought, two separate theories of social, religious and political life, been working out the two types of men, which have in our day flowered into the perfection of contrast—vivid, thorough pervasive. For seven generations the ancestors of Joe Brown have been aggressive rebels; for a longer time the Toombs have been dauntless and intolerant followers of the king and kingliness. At the siege of Londonderry—the most remarkable fasting match beyond Tanner—Margaret and James Brown, grandparents of the James Brown who came to America and was grandparent of Joe Brown, were within the walls starving 246and fighting for William and Mary; and I have no doubt there were hard-riding Toombs outside the walls charging in the name of the peevish and unhappy James. Certain it is that forty years before, the direct ancestors of General Toombs on the Toombs estate were hiding good King Charles in the oak at Boscabel, where, I have no doubt, the father and uncles of the Londonderry Brown, with cropped hair and severe mien, were proguing about the place with their pikes, searching every bush, in the name of Cromwell and the psalm-singers. From these initial points sprang the two strains of blood—the one affluent, impetuous, prodigal, the other slow, resolute, forceful. From these ancestors came the two men—the one superb, ruddy, fashioned with incomparable grace and fulness; the other pale, thoughtful, angular, stripped down to bone and sinew. From these opposing theories came the two types—the one patrician, imperious, swift in action and brooking no stay; the other democratic, sagacious, jealous of rights and submitting to no imposition. The one for the king; the other for the people. It does not matter that the elder Toombs was a rebel in Virginia against the fat George, for that revolt was kingly of itself, and the Virginian cavaliers went into it with love-locks flying and care cast to the winds, feeling little of the patient spirit of James Brown, who, by his Carolina fireside, fashioned his remonstrance slowly, and at last put his life upon the issue.

Governor Brown and General Toombs started under circumstances in accordance with the suggestions of the foregoing. General Toombs’s father had a fine estate, given him by the State of Georgia, and his son had a fine education and started in life in liberal trim. Governor Brown had nothing, and for years hauled wood to Dahlonega; and sold vegetables from a basket to the hotel and what others would buy. Young Toombs made money rapidly, his practice for the first five years amounting to much over $50,000. He conquered by the grace of his genius, and went easily from triumph to triumph. Young Brown moved ahead laboriously but steadily. He made only 247about $1200 his first year, and then pushed his practice to $2000 or $3000. He made no brilliant reputation, but never lost a client, and added to his income and practice. His progress was the result of hard labor and continuous work. He lived moderately and his habits were simple. General Toombs has lived in princely style all his life, and has always been fond of wine and cards. Both men are rich, and both are well preserved for their time of life. General Toombs is seventy-one and Governor Brown fifty-nine. Each had a lucky stroke early in life, and in both cases it was in a land investment. General Toombs bought immense tracts of Texas land, of which he has sold perhaps $100,000 profit and still holds enough to yield double or treble that much more. Governor Brown, when very young, paid $450 for a piece of land, and afterward sold a half interest in a copper mine thereon for $25,000. This he invested in farms, and thus laid the basis of his fortune.

The first time these men met was in Milledgeville, in 1851 or ’52, when Governor Brown was a young Democratic State Senator and General Toombs was a Whig Congressman—then the idol of his party and the most eloquent man in Georgia. They were then just such men physically as one who had never seen them would imagine from reading their lives. General Toombs was, as Governor Brown has told me, “the handsomest man he ever saw.” His physique was superb, his grand head fit for a crown, his presence that of a king, overflowing with vitality, his majestic face illumined with his divine genius. Governor Brown was then pallid, uncomely—his awkward frame packed closely with nerve and sinew, and fed with a temperate flow of blood. They met next at Marietta, where Toombs had a fiery debate with that rare master of discussion, the late Robert Cowart. Governor Brown was deeply impressed with the power and genius of that wonderful man, but General Toombs thought but little of the awkward young mountaineer. For later, when in Texas, hearing that Joe Brown was nominated for Governor, he 248did not even remember his name, and had to ask a Georgia-Texan “who the devil it was.”

But the next time he met him he remembered it. Of course we all remember when the “Know-Nothings” took possession of the Whig party, and Toombs and Stephens seceded. Stephens having a campaign right on him, and being pressed to locate himself, said he was neither Whig nor Democrat, but “was toting his own skillet,” thus introducing that homely but expressive phrase into our political history. Toombs was in the Senate and had time for reflection. It ended by his marching into the Democratic camp. Shortly afterward he was astounded at seeing the standard of his party, upon the success of which his seat in the Senate depended, put in the hands of Joe Brown, a new campaigner, while the opposition was led by Ben Hill, then as now an audacious and eloquent speaker, incomparable on the stump. Hill and Brown had had a meeting at Athens, I believe, and it was reported that Brown had been worsted. Howell Cobb wrote Toombs that he must take the canvass in hand at once, at least until Brown could learn how to manage himself. Toombs wrote to Brown to come to his home at Washington, which he did. General Toombs told me that he was not hopeful when he met the new candidate, but after talking to him awhile, found that he had wonderful judgment and sagacity. After coquetting with Mr. Hill a while, they started on a tour together, going to south Georgia. General Toombs has talked to me often about this experience. He says that after two or three speeches Governor Brown was as fully equipped as if he had been in public for forty years, and he was amazed at the directness with which he would get to the hearts of the masses. He talked in simple style, using the homeliest phrases, but his words went home every time. There was a sympathy between the speaker and the people that not even the eloquence of Toombs could emphasize, or the matchless skill of Mr. Hill disturb. In Brown the people saw one of themselves, lifted above them by his superior ability, and his unerring sagacity, but talking to 249them common sense in a sensible way. General Toombs soon saw that the new candidate was more than able to take care of himself, and left him to make his tour alone—impressed with the fact that a new element had been introduced into our politics and that a new leader had arisen.

It is hard to say which has been the more successful of the two men. Neither has ever been beaten before the people. General Toombs has won his victories with the more ease. He has gone to power as a king goes to his throne, and no one has gainsaid him. Governor Brown has had to fight his way through. It has been a struggle all the time, and he has had to summon every resource to carry his point. Each has made unsurpassed records in his departments. As Senator, General Toombs was not only invincible, he was glorious. As Governor, was not only invincible, he was wise. General Toombs’s campaigns have been unstudied and careless, and were won by his presence, his eloquence, his greatness. His canvass was always an ovation, his only caucusing was done on the hustings. With Governor Brown it was different. He planned his campaigns and then went faithfully through them. His victories were none the less sure, because his canvass was more laborious. His nomination as Governor, while unexpected, was not accidental. It was the inevitable outcome of his young life, disciplined so marvelously, so full of thought, sagacity and judgment. If he had not been nominated Governor then, his time would have come at last, just as sure as cause produces result. His record as Governor proves that he was prepared for the test—just as his brilliant record in the Senate proves that he is fitted for any sphere to which he might be called.

To sum it up: Toombs is the embodiment of genius, and Brown is the embodiment of common sense. One is brilliant, the other unerring; one is eloquent, the other sagacious. Toombs moves by inspiration; Brown is governed by judgment. The first is superb; the latter is sage. Despite the fact that Governor Brown is by instinct and by inheritance a rebel, he is prudent, conservative, and has a 250turn for building things up. General Toombs, despite his love for kingliness and all that implies, has an almost savage instinct for overturning systems and tearing things down. It must not be understood that I depreciate General Toombs’s wisdom. Genius often flies as true to its mark as judgment can go. The wisest speech, and the ablest ever made by an American, in my opinion, is Mr. Toombs’s speech on slavery, delivered in Boston about ten years before the war. In that speech he showed a prescience almost divine, and clad in the light of thirty years of confirmation, it is simply marvelous. His leadership of the southern Whigs in the House during the contest of 1850 was a masterpiece of brilliancy, and even his Hamilcar speech, delivered after the most exasperating insults, was sublime in its lofty eloquence and courage. Safer as a leader, Governor Brown is more sagacious on material points—truer to the practical purposes of government: but no man but Toombs could have represented Georgia as he did for the decade preceding 1860.

Messrs. Brown and Toombs have disagreed since the war. That Governor Brown may have been wiser in “reconstruction” than Mr. Toombs, many wise men believe, and events may have proved. In that matter my heart was with Mr. Toombs, and I have never seen reason to recall it. That Governor Brown was honest and patriotic in his advice, my knowledge of the man would not permit me to doubt. The trouble between these gentlemen came very near resulting in a duel. While I join with all good men that this duel was arrested, I confess that I have been wicked enough to speculate on its probable result—had it occurred. In the first place, General Toombs made no preparation for the duel. He went along in his careless and kingly way, trusting, presumably, to luck and quick shot. Governor Brown, on the contrary, made the most careful and deliberate preparation. He made his will, put his estate in order, withdrew from the church, and then clipped all the trees in his orchard practicing with the pistol. Had the duel come off—which fortunately it did not—General 251Toombs would have fired with his usual magnificence and his usual disregard of rule. I do not mean to imply that he would not have hit Governor Brown; on the contrary, he might have perforated him in a dozen places at once. But one thing is sure—Governor Brown would have clasped his long white fingers around the pistol butt, adjusted it to his gray eye, and sent his bullet within the eighth of an inch of the place he had selected. I should not be surprised if he drew a diagram of General Toombs, and marked off with square and compass the exact spot he wanted to hit.

General Toombs has always been loose and prodigal in his money matters. Governor Brown has been precise and economical all his life, and gives $50,000 to a Baptist college—not a larger amount probably than General Toombs has dispensed casually, but how much more compact and useful! This may be a good fact to stop on, as it furnishes a point of view from which the two lives may be logically surveyed. Two great lives they are, illustrious and distinguished—utterly dissimilar. Georgia could have spared neither and is jealous of both. I could write of them for hours, but the people are up and the flags are flying, and the journalist has no time for moralizing or leisurely speculation.

“YOU are the no-countest, laziest, meanest dog that ever wore breeches! Never let me see you again!”

Thus Mrs. Tag to Mr. Tag, her husband; she standing in the door, her arms akimbo, and, cat-like, spitting the words at him.

Mr. Tag made no reply. He did not even put up his hands in evasion. He stood dazed and bewildered, as one who hesitates in a sudden shower, and then turning, pulled his old hat down over his shoulders, as if she was throwing rocks at him instead of words, and shambled off in silence, quickening his retreat by a pitiful little jerk, every time she launched a new volley at him.

This she did as often as her brains could forge them and her tongue send them. She stood there, the very picture of fury. And at length, with disgust on every feature, she turned, sprawled a weevilly little child that was clinging to her skirts, and went into the house.

As for Mr. Tag, he hurried on, never once looking back until he had reached a hill, against which the sun was setting. He then slowed up a little, lifted the flap of his hat cautiously, as if to be sure he was out of ear-shot—then stopped. He pulled off his hat, shook it to and fro—unconsciously, I think—in his hand as one who comes out of the storm. He looked about him a while, as if undetermined, and then browsed about vaguely in the sunset, until his bent, shambling figure seemed melting into the golden glory that enveloped it; and his round, chubby head was tipped with light.

253I thought probably he wanted to see me, so I climbed up the hill. He seemed to approve of my coming, and walked down in the shade to meet me.

“Ann was sorter rough to me, wan’t she?” he said, with a chuckle of deprecation.

I assented quietly to the lack of smoothness in Ann’s remarks.

“You aint know’d me long,” he said, with a sudden flicker of earnestness; “and you’ve knowed the worst part of me. You’ve knowed the trouble and the fag-end. You warn’t in at the good part of my life!”

I should think not, poor fellow. Ever since I had known him he had been the same shabby, good-for-nothing that he is now. He had grown a bit more serious of late, and his long face—it was abnormally long between the eyes and the chin—had whitened somewhat, but otherwise he was about the same shabby, ragged, half-starved old fellow I had known for a year or so. Yes, Bob, I had clearly known the worst of you!

“I was a better man once; not a better man, either, as I know of, but I had luck. When me and Ann married, there warn’t a happier couple nowhere. I remember just as well when I courted her. She didn’t think about me then as she does now. We had a buggy to ourselves, and we turned down a shady road. I fetched it on soon after we left the crowd, and she was about as well pleased as me. It seemed like that road was the road to heaven, and we was so happy that we wasn’t in no hurry to get to the end of it. Ann was handsome then. Oh yes, she was!”—as I winced at this,—“and at first as good a wife to me as ever a man had.

“It may a-been me that started the trouble. I was unfortnit in everything I touched. My fingers slipped off o’ everything and everything slipped off o’ them. I could get no grip on nothin’. I worked hard, but something harder agin me. Ann was ambitious and uppish, and I used to think when I come home at night, most tired to death, she was gettin’ to despise me. She’d snap me up 254and abuse me till actually I was afraid to come home. I never misused her or give her a back word. I thought maybe she wasn’t to blame, and that what she said about me was true. Things kept a-gitten worse, and we sold off pretty much what we had. Five years ago a big surprise came to us. It was a baby—a boy—him!” nodding toward the hut. “It was a surprise to both of us. We’d been married fourteen years. It made Ann harder on me than ever. She never let me rest; it was all the time hard words and hard looks. I never raised even a look against her, o’ course. I thought she was right about me. He never had a cross word with me. Him and me knowed each other from the start. We had a langwidge of our own. Ther wasn’t no words in it—just looks and grunts. I never could git ‘nough, nuther could he. He know’d more an’ me. Ther was a kinder way-off look in his eyes that was solemn and deep, I tell you. At last Ann got to breaking me up. Whenever she catch me with him she’d drive me off. I’d always hurry off, ’cause I never wanted him to hear her ’spressin herself ’bout me. ’Peared like he understood every word of it. Mos’t two years ago, and I ain’t had one since. I couldn’t git one. Ann commenced takin’ in washing, and one day she said I shouldn’t hang around no more a-eatin’ him and her out of house and home. That was more’n a year ago, and I seen him since to talk to him. Every time I go about she hustles me about like she did to-day. I never make no fuss. She’s right about me, I reckon. I am powerful no ’count. But he has stirred things in me I ain’t felt movin’ for many a year!”

“What’s his name, Bob?”

“Got none. She never would let me talk to her ’bout it, and I ain’t got no right to name him. I ast her once how it would do to call him little Bob, and she said I better git him sumpin’ to eat; he couldn’t eat a name, nor dress in it neither; which was true. But he’s got my old face on him, and my look. I know that, and he knows it too.”

“Did you ever drink, Bob?”

255“Me? You know I didn’t. I did get drunk once. The boys give me the wine. They say liquor makes a man savage, and makes him beat his wife. It didn’t take me that way. I was the happiest fellow you ever see. I felt light and free. My blood was warm, and just jumped along—and beat Ann? why, all the old love come back to me, as I went to’ards home, feelin’ big as a king. I made as how I’d go up to Ann and put arm aroun’ her neck in the old way, and tell her if she’d only encourage me a little, I’d get about for her and him and make ’em both rich. I couldn’t hardly wait to get home, I was so full of it. She was just settin’ down a pail of water when I come in. I made for her, gentle like, and had just got my arms to her neck, when she drawed back, with a few words like them this evening, and dosed the pail of water full in my face. As I scrambled out o’ the door, sorter blind like, I struck the edge o’ the gulley there, rolled down head over heels, and fotch up squar’ at the bottom, as sober a man as ever you see!”

I met Bob a few days after that in a state of effusive delight. He would not disclose himself at first. He followed me through several blocks, and at length, diving into an alley, beckoned me cautiously to him. He took off his old hat, always with him a preliminary to conversation, and glancing cautiously around, said in a hoarse whisper:

“Had a pic-nic to-day.”

“A pic-nic! Who?”

“Me and him!”

And his wrinkled, weather-beaten old face was broken by smiles and chuckles, that struggled to the surface, as porpoises do, and then shrunk back into the depths from whence they came.

“You don’t know Phenice—the neighbor’s gal as nusses him sometimes? Well, I seed her out with him, to-day, and I tolled her off kinder, till she got beyant the hill, and then I give her a quarter I had got, and purposed 256as how she should gi’ me a little time with him. She sciddled off to town to git her quarter spent, and I took him and made for the woods, to meet her thar agin, by sun!”

“He’s a deep one, I tell you!” he said, drawing a breath of admiration; “as deep a one as I ever see. He’d never been in the woods before, but he jest knowed it all! You orter seed him when a jay-bird come and sot on a high limb, and flung him some sass, and tried to sorter to make free with him. The look that boy give him couldn’t a’ been beat by nobody. The jay tried to hold up to it and chaffered a little, but he finally had to skip, the wust beat bird you ever saw!”

And so the old fellow went on, telling me about that wonderful pic-nic; how he had gathered flowers for the baby, and made little bouquets, which the baby received with a critical air, as if he had spent his life in a florist’s shop, and being a connoisseur in flowers, couldn’t afford to become enthusiastic over pied daisies; how a gray squirrel scampering down a near tree had startled him out of his wits, while the baby, seated still nearer the disturbance than he, remained a marvel of stolidity and presence of mind; how the baby was finally coaxed out of his wise reserve by a group of yellow butterflies pulsating in the golden sunshine, and by the flashing of the silvery brook that ran beneath them; how all the birds in the county seemed to have entered into a conspiracy to upset that baby’s dignity; and how they would assail him with pert bursts of song and rapid curvetings about his head, while Bob sat off at a distance, “and let ’em fight it out, not helping one side or t’other,” always to see the chatterers retire in good-humored defeat before the serene impassibility of the youngster; how the only drawback to the pic-nic was that there was not a thing to eat, and besides its being in violation of all pic-nic precedent, there was danger of the little one getting very hungry; and how, in the evening—what would have been after dinner if they’d had any dinner—the baby, who was sitting opposite 257Bob on the grass, suddenly assumed an air of deeper solemnity, even than he had worn before, and gazed at Bob with a dense and inscrutable gaze, until he was actually embarrassed by the searching and fixed character of this look; and how the round, grave head suddenly keeled to one side as if it were so heavy with ideas that it could not be held upright any longer; and how then, suddenly, and without a sign or hint of warning, this self-possessed baby tumbled over in the grass, shot his little toes upward, and, before Bob could reach him, was dead asleep! And Bob told me then, with the glittering tears gathering in his eyes and rolling down his old cheeks, how he had picked the baby up and cuddled him close to his old bosom, and listened to his soft breathing, and stroked his chubby face, and almost guessed the wise dreams that were flitting through his round fuzzy head,—hugged him so close, and pressed him to his bosom with such hungry, tender love, that he felt as if he had him “layin’ agin’ my naked heart, and warmin’ it up, and stirrin’ all its strings with his little fingers!”

It was late that night when I went home—after one o’clock; a fearful night, too. The rain was pouring in torrents and the wind howled like mad. Taking a near cut home, I passed by the hut where Bob’s wife lived. Through the drifting rain, I saw a dark figure against the side of the house. Stepping closer, I saw that it was Bob, mounted on a barrel, flattened out against the planks, his old felt hat down about his ears, and the rain pouring from it in streams—his face glued to the window.

Poor old follow! there he was! oblivious to the storm, to hunger and everything else—clinging like some homeless night-bird, drifting and helpless, to the outside of his own home; gazing in stealthily at the bed where the little one slept, and warming his old heart up with the memory of that wondrous pic-nic—of the solemn contest with the impertinent jay-bird, and the grave rapture over the butterflies that swung lazily about in their rift of sunshine.

258One morning, many months after the pic-nic, Bob came to me sideways. His right arm hung limp and inert by his side, and his right leg dragged helplessly after the left. The yielding muscles of the neck had stiffened and drawn his head awry. He stumbled clumsily to where I was standing, and received my look of surprise shamefacedly.

“I’ve had a stroke,” he said. “Paralysis? It’s most used me up. I reckon I’ll never be able to do anything for him! It came on me sudden,” he said, as if to say that if it had given him any sort of notice, he could have dodged it.

After that Bob went on from worse to worse. His face, all save that fixed in the rigid grasp of the paralysis, became tremulous, pitiful and uncertain. He had lost all the chirrupy good-humor of the other days, and became shy and silent. There was a wistfulness and yearning in his face that would have made your heart ache; a hungry passion had struggled from the depth of his soul, and peered out of his blue eyes, and tugged at the corners of his mouth. There was, too, a pitiful, scary look about him. He had the air of one who is pursued. At the slightest sigh he would pluck at his lame leg sharply, and shamble off, turning full around at intervals to see if he was followed. I learned that his wife had become even harder on him since his trouble, and that he was even more than ever afraid of her.

He had never had another “pic-nic.” He had snatched a furtive interview with the baby, under protection of the occasional nurse, from each of which he came to me with a new idea of the “deepness” of that infant. “He’s too much for me, that baby is!” he would say. “If I just had his sense!” He was rapidly getting shabbier, and thinner and more woe-begone. He became a slink. He hid about in the day-time, avoiding everybody, and seeming to carry off his love and his passion, as a dog with a bone, seeking an alley. At night he would be seen hanging like a guilty thief about the hut in which his treasure was hid.

“I’ve a mind,” he said one morning, “to go home. I 259don’t think she” (he had quit calling her “Ann” now) “could drive me out now. All I’d want would be to just sit in a corner o’ the house and be with him. That’s all.”

“Bob,” I said to him one morning, “you rascal, you are starving!”

He couldn’t deny it. He tried to put it off, but he couldn’t. His face told on him.

“Have you had anything to eat to-day?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor yesterday?”

“No, sir.”

I gave him a half-dollar. A wolfish glare of hunger shot into his eyes as he saw the money. He clutched it with a spasm of haste and started off. I watched his side-long walk down the street, and then went to work, satisfied that he would go off and pack himself full.

It was hardly an hour before he came back, his face brighter than I had seen it in months. He carried a bundle in his live hand. He laid it on my desk, and then fell back on his dead leg while I opened it. I found in the bundle a red tin horse, attached to a blue tin wagon, on which was seated a green tin driver. I looked up in blank astonishment.

“For him!” he said simply. And then he broke down. He turned slowly on his live leg as an axis and leaned against the wall.

“Could you send it to him?” he said at last. “If she knew I sent it, she mightn’t let him have it. He’s never had nothin’ o’ this kind, and I thought it might pearten him up.”

“Bob, is this the money I gave you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you were starving when you left here?”

“Oh, I got some bread!”

I suppose every man, woman and child remembers that terrible night three years ago when we had lightning while the snow was on the ground. The flashes plowed great 260yellow seams through the gray of the day, and at night a freezing storm of sleet and rain came.

It was a terrible night. I staggered home through it to where a big fire, and blue eyes and black, and slippers, and roasting apples were awaiting me. I thought of Bob—my old night-owl, with a heart in him, and wondered whether he was keeping his silent, but uncomplaining vigil about the little hut on the hillside. I even went so far as to speculate on this point with a certain blue-eyed youngster on my knee, to whom Bob’s life was a romance and a wonder.

Bless me! and all the time I was pitying him, I didn’t know that he had “gone home” and was all right.

His wife slept uneasily that night, as she has since said. She rolled in her sleep a long time, and at last got up and went to the window and looked out. She shuddered at the sound of the whizzing sleet and pitiless hum of the rain on the roof. Then she stumbled sleepily back to her couch, and dreamed of a long shady lane, and a golden-green afternoon in May, and a bright-faced young fellow that looked into her heart, and held her face in his soft fingers. How this dream became tangled in her thoughts that night of all nights, she never could tell. But there it was gleaming like a thread of gold through the dismal warp and woof of her life.

It was full day when she awoke. As she turned lazily upon her side she started up in affright. There was a man, dripping wet, silent, kneeling by her bedside. An old felt hat lay upon the floor. The man’s head was bowed deep down over the bed and his hands were bundled tenderly about one of the baby’s fists that had been thrown above its head.

The worn, weatherbeaten figure was familiar to her. But there was something that stopped her, as she started forward angrily. She stood posed like a statue for a moment, then bent down, curiously and tenderly, and with trembling fingers pulled the cover back from the bed, and looked up into the man’s face steadily. Then she put her 261fingers on his hand furtively and shrinkingly. And then a strange look crept into her face—the dream of the night came to her like a flash—and she sank back upon the floor, and dropped her head between her knees.

Ah, yes, Bob had “come home.”

And the poor fellow had come to stay. Not even his place in the corner would he want now! No place about the scanty board! Just to stay—that was all; not to offend by his laziness, or to annoy with his ugly, shambling figure, and his no-count ways. Just “come home to stay!”

And there the baby slept quietly, all unconscious of the shadow and the mystery that hung above his wise little head—unconscious of the shabby old watcher, and the woman on the floor, dreaming, perhaps, of the swinging butterflies and the chaffing birds and the brook flashing in the sunshine. And there was old Bob—brave, at last, through love—“come home.”

Out of the storm like a night-bird! In the door stealthily like a thief! Groping his way to the bedside through the dark like a murderer! But there was no danger in him—no ill-omen about him. It was only old Bob, come home, “come home to stay!”

He had clasped the little hand he loved so well in his rough palm and cuddled it close, as if he hoped to hold it always—fondled it in his hands, as if he hoped to ride his own life on the spring-tide that gathered in its rosy palm, or to catch that young life in the ebbing billows that wasted from his cold fingers. But no; the baby was “too much for him!” And the young heart, all unconscious and all perverse, sent the rich blood through the little arm, down the slender wrist, and into the dimpled fist, where it pulsed and throbbed uneasily, as it broke against the chill, stark presence of Death!

IT has long been the fortune of the South to deal with special problems—slavery, secession, reconstruction. For fifty years has the settlement of these questions engaged her people, and challenged the attention of the world. As these issues are set aside finally, after stubborn and bloody conflict, during which she maintained her position with courage, and abided results with fortitude, she finds herself confronted with a new problem quite as important as either of those that have been disposed of. In the cultivation and handling, under the new order of things, of the world’s great staple, cotton, she is grappling with a matter that involves essentially her own welfare, and is of the greatest interest to the general public. To the slaveholder the growing of cotton was straight and easy, as the product of his land was supplemented by the increase of his slaves, and he prospered in spite of himself. To the Southern farmer of post-bellum days, impoverished, unsettled, and thrown upon free labor, working feverishly with untried conditions, poorly informed as to the result of experiments made by his neighbors, and too impatient to wait upon his own experience, it is quite a different affair. After sixteen years of trial, everything is yet indeterminate. And whether this staple is cultivated in the South as a profit or a passion, and whether it shall bring the South to independence or to beggary, are matters yet to be settled. Whether its culture shall result in a host of croppers without money or credit, appealing to the granaries of the West against famine, paying toll to usurers at home, and mortgaging their crops to speculators abroad even before it is planted—a planting oligarchy of money-lenders, who have usurped the land through foreclosure, and hold by 263the ever-growing margin between a grasping lender and an enforced borrower—or a prosperous self-respecting race of small farmers, cultivating their own lands, living upon their own resources, controlling their crops until they are sold, and independent alike of usurers and provision brokers—which of these shall be the outcome of cotton culture the future must determine. It is certain only in the present that the vigor of the cotton producers and the pace at which they are moving are rapidly forcing a settlement of these questions, and that the result of the experiments now swiftly working out in the South will especially concern a large part of the human race, from the farmer who plods down the cotton row, cutting through his doubts with a hoe, to the spinner in Manchester who anxiously balances the totals of the world’s crop.

It may be well to remark at the outset that the production of cotton in the South is practically without limit. It was 1830 before the American crop reached 1,000,000 bales, and the highest point ever reached in the days of slavery was a trifle above 4,500,000 bales. The crop of 1880-81 is about 2,000,000 in excess of this, and there are those who believe that a crop of 8,000,000 bales is among the certainties of the next few years. The heavy increase in the cotton crop is due entirely to the increase of cotton acreage brought about by the use of fertilizers. Millions of acres of land, formerly thought to be beyond the possible limit of the cotton belt, have been made the best of cotton lands by being artificially enriched. In North Carolina alone the limit of cotton production has been moved twenty miles northward and twenty miles westward, and the half of Georgia on which no cotton was grown twenty years ago now produces fully half the crop of the State. The “area of low production” as the Atlantic States are brought to the front by artificial stimulation is moving westward, and is now central in Alabama and Florida. But the increase in acreage, large as it is, will be but a small factor in the increase of production, compared to the intensifying of the cultivation of the land now in use. Under 264the present loose system of planting, the average yield is hardly better than one bale to three acres. This could be easily increased to a bale an acre. In Georgia five bales have been raised on one acre, and a yield of three bales to the acre is credited to several localities. President Morehead, of the Mississippi Valley Cotton Planters’ Association, says that the entire cotton crop of the present year might have been easily raised in fourteen counties along the Mississippi River. It will be seen, therefore, that the capacity of the South to produce cotton is practically limitless, and when we consider the enormous demand for cotton goods now opening up from new climes and peoples, we may conclude that the near future will see crops compared to which the crop of the past year, worth $300,000,000, will seem small.

Who will be the producers of these vast crops of the future? Will they be land-owners or tenants—planters or farmers? The answer to this inquiry will be made by the average Southerners without hesitation. “Small farms,” he will say, “well tended by actual owners, will be the rule in the South. The day of a land-holding oligarchy has passed forever.” Let us see about this.

The history of agriculture—slow and stubborn industry that it is—will hardly show stronger changes than have taken place in the rural communities of the South in the past fifteen years. Immediately after the war between the States there was a period of unprecedented disaster. The surrender of the Confederate armies found the plantations of the South stripped of houses, fences, stock, and implements. The planters were without means or prospects, and uncertain as to what should be done. The belief that extensive cotton culture had perished with slavery had put the price of the staple up to thirty cents. Lured by the dazzling price, which gave them credit as well as hope, the owners of the plantations prepared for vast operations. They refitted their quarters, repaired their fences, summoned hundreds of negro croppers at high prices, and invested lavishly their borrowed capital in what they felt 265sure was a veritable bonanza. The few years that followed are full of sickening failure. Planters who had been princes in wealth and possessions suddenly found themselves irretrievably in debt and reduced to beggary. Under the stimulation of high prices the crops grew, until there was a tumble from thirty to ten cents per pound. Unable to meet their engagements with their factors, who, suddenly awakening to the peril of the situation, refused to make further advances or grant extensions, the planters had no recourse but to throw their lands on the market. But so terrible had been their experience—many losing $100,000 in a single season—that no buyers were found for the plantations on which they had been wrecked. The result of this panic to sell and disinclination to buy was a toppling of land values. Plantations that had brought from $100,000 to $150,000 before the war, and even since, were sold at $6000 to $10,000, or hung on the hands of the planter and his factor at any price whatever. The ruin seemed to be universal and complete, and the old plantation system, it then seemed, had perished utterly and forever. While no definite reason was given for the failure—free labor and the credit system being the causes usually and loosely assigned—it went without contradiction that the system of planting under which the South had amassed its riches and lived in luxury was inexorably doomed.

Following this lavish and disastrous period came the era of small farms. Led into the market by the low prices to which the best lands had fallen, came a host of small buyers, to accommodate whom the plantations were subdivided, and offered in lots to suit purchasers. Never perhaps was there a rural movement, accomplished without revolution or exodus, that equalled in extent and swiftness the partition of the plantations of the ex-slave-holders into small farms. As remarkable as was the eagerness of the negroes—who bought in Georgia alone 6850 farms in three years—the earth-hunger of the poorer class of the whites, who had been unable under the slave-holding oligarchy to own land, was even more striking. In Mississippi there 266were in 1867 but 412 farms of less than ten acres, and in 1870, 11,003; only 2314 of over ten and less than twenty acres, and 1870, 8981; only 16,024 between twenty and one hundred acres, and in 1870, 38,015. There was thus in this one State a gain of nearly forty thousand small farms of less than one hundred acres in about three years. In Georgia the number of small farms sliced off of the big plantations from 1868 to 1873 was 32,824. In Liberty County there were in 1866 only three farms of less than ten acres; in 1870 there were 616, and 749 farms between ten and twenty acres. This splitting of the old plantations into farms went on with equal rapidity all over the South, and was hailed with lively expressions of satisfaction. A population pinned down to the soil on which it lived, made conservative and prudent by land-ownership, forced to abandon the lavish method of the old time as it had nothing to spare, and to cultivate closely and intelligently as it had no acres to waste, living on cost as it had no credit, and raising its own supplies as it could not afford to buy—this the South boasted it had in 1873, and this many believe it has to-day. The small farmer—who was to retrieve the disasters of the South, and wipe out the last vestige of the planting aristocracy, between which and the people there was always a lack of sympathy, by keeping his own acres under his own supervision, and using hired labor only as a supplement to his own—is still held to be the typical cotton-raiser.

But the observer who cares to look beneath the surface will detect signs of a reverse current. He will discover that there is beyond question a sure though gradual rebunching of the small farms into large estates, and a tendency toward the re-establishment of a land-holding oligarchy. Here and there through all the Cotton States, and almost in every county, are reappearing the planter princes of the old time, still lords of acres, though not of slaves. There is in Mississippi one planter who raises annually 12,000 bales of cotton on twelve consolidated plantations, aggregating perhaps 50,000 acres. The Capeheart estate 267on Albemarle Sound, originally of several thousand acres, had $52,000 worth of land added last year. In the Mississippi Valley, where, more than anywhere else, is preserved the distinctive cotton plantation, this re-absorbing of separate farms into one ownership is going on rapidly. Mr. F. C. Morehead, an authority on these lands, says that not one-third of them are owned by the men who held them at the close of the war, and that they are passing, one after the other, into the hands of the commission merchants. It is doubtful if there is a neighborhood in all the South in which casual inquiry will not bring to the front from ten to a dozen men who have added farm after farm to their possessions for the past several years, and now own from six to twenty places. It must not be supposed that these farms are bunched together and run after the old plantation style. On the contrary, they are cut into even smaller farms, and rented to small croppers. The question involved is not whether or not the old plantation methods shall be revived. It is the much more serious problem as to whether the lands divided forever into small farms shall be owned by the many or by the few, whether we shall have in the South a peasantry like that of France, or a tenantry like that of Ireland.

By getting at the cause of this threatened re-absorption of the small farmer into the system from which he so eagerly and bravely sought release, we shall best understand the movement. It is primarily credit—a false credit based on usury and oppression, strained to a point where it breeds distrust and provokes a percentage to compensate for risk, and strained, not for the purchase of land, which is a security as long as the debt is unpaid, but for provisions and fertilizers, which are valueless to either secure the lender or assist the borrower to pay. With the failure of the large planters and their withdrawal from business, banks, trust companies, and capitalists withdraw their money from agricultural loans. The new breed of farmers held too little land and were too small dealers to command credit or justify investigation. And yet they were obliged 268to have money with which to start their work. Commission merchants therefore borrowed the money from the banks, and loaned it to village brokers or store-keepers, who in turn loaned it to farmers in their neighborhood, usually in the form of advancing supplies. It thus came to the farmer after it had been through three principals, each of whom demanded a heavy percentage for the risk he assumed. In every case the farmer gave a lien or mortgage upon his crop of land. In this lien he waived exemptions and defense, and it amounted in effect to a deed. Having once given such a paper to his merchant, his credit was of course gone, and he had to depend upon the man who held the mortgage for his supplies. To that man he must carry his crop when it was gathered, pay him commission for handling it, and accept the settlement that he offered. To give an idea of the oppressiveness of this system it is only necessary to quote the Commissioner of Agriculture of Georgia, who by patient investigation discovered that the Georgia farmers paid prices for supplies that averaged fifty-four per cent. interest on all they bought. For instance, corn that sold for eighty-nine cents a bushel cash was sold on time secured by a lien at a dollar and twelve cents. In Mississippi the percentage is even more terrible, as the crop lien laws are in force there, and the crop goes into the hands of the merchant, who charges commission on the estimated number of bales, whether a half crop or a full one is raised. Even this maladjustment of credits would not impoverish the farmer if he did not yield to the infatuation for cotton-planting, and fail to plant anything but cotton.

Those who have the nerve to give up part of their land and labor to the raising of their own supplies and stock have but little need of credit, and consequently seldom get into the hands of the usurers. But cotton is the money crop, and offers such flattering inducements that everything yields to that. It is not unusual to see farmers come to the cities to buy butter, melons, meal, and vegetables. They rely almost entirely upon their merchants for meat and 269bread, hay, forage, and stock. In one county in Georgia last year, from the small dépôts, $80,000 worth of meat and bread was shipped to farmers. The official estimate of the National Cotton Planters’ Association, at its session of 1881, was that the Cotton States lacked 42,252,244 bushels of wheat, 166,684,279 bushels of corn, 77,762,108 bushels of oats, or 286,698,632 bushels of grain, of raising what it consumed. When to this is added 4,011,150 tons of hay at thirty dollars a ton, and $32,000,000 paid for fertilizers, we find that the value of the cotton crop is very largely consumed in paying for the material with which it was made. On this enormous amount the cotton farmer has to pay the usurous percentage charged by his merchant broker, which is never less than thirty per cent., and frequently runs up to seventy per cent. We can appreciate, when we consider this, the statement of the man who said, “The commission merchants of the South are gradually becoming farmers, and the farmers, having learned the trick, will become merchants.”

The remedy for this deplorable tendency is first the establishment of a proper system of credit. The great West was in much worse condition than the South some years ago. The farms were mortgaged, and were being sold under mortgages, under a system not half so oppressive as that under which the Southern farmer labors. Boston capital, seeking lucrative investment, soon began to pour toward the West, in charge of loan companies, and was put out at eight per cent., and the redemption of that section was speedily worked out. A similar movement is now started in the South. An English company, with headquarters at New Orleans, loaned over $600,000 its first year at eight per cent., with perfect security. The farmers who borrowed this money were of course immensely relieved, and the testimony is that they are rapidly working out. In Atlanta, Georgia, a company is established with $2,000,000 of Boston and New York capital, which it is loaning on farm lands at seven per cent. In the first three months of its work it loaned $120,000, and it has now appointed local 270agents in thirty counties in the State, and advertises that it wishes to lend $50,000 in each county. The managers say that they can command practically unlimited capital for safe risks at seven per cent. Companies working on the same plan have been established elsewhere in the South, and it is said that there will be no lack of capital for safe risks on rural lands in a few years.

The first reform, however, that must be made is in the system of farming. The South must prepare to raise her own provisions, compost her fertilizers, cure her own hay, and breed her own stock. Leaving credit and usury out of the question, no man can pay seventy-five cents a bushel for corn, thirty dollars a ton for hay, twenty dollars a barrel for pork, sixty cents for oats, and raise cotton for eight cents a pound. The farmers who prosper at the South are the “corn-raisers,” i.e., the men who raise their own supplies, and make cotton their surplus crop. A gentleman who recorded 320 mortgages last year testified that not one was placed on the farm of a man who raised his own bread and meat. The shrewd farmers who always have a bit of money on hand with which to buy any good place that is to be sold under mortgage are the “corn-raisers,” and the moment they get possession they rule out the all-cotton plan, and plant corn and the grasses. That the plan of farming only needs revision to make the South rich beyond measure is proven by constant example. A corn-raiser bought a place of 370 acres for $1700. He at once put six tenants on it, and limited their cotton acreage to one-third of what they had under cultivation. Each one of the six made more clear money than the former owner had made, and the rents for the first year were $1126. The man who bought this farm lives in Oglethorpe, Georgia, and has fifteen farms all run on the same plan.

The details of the management of what may be the typical planting neighborhood of the South in the future are furnished me by the manager of the Capeheart estate in North Carolina. This estate is divided into farms of fifty acres each, and rented to tenants. These tenants are 271bound to plant fifteen acres in cotton, twelve in corn, eight in small crops, and let fifteen lie in grass. They pay one-third of the crop as rent, or one-half if the proprietor furnishes horses and mules. They have comfortable quarters, and are entitled to the use of surplus herring and the dressings of the herring caught in the fisheries annexed to the place. In the center of the estate is a general store managed by the proprietor, at which the tenants have such a line of credit as they are entitled to, of course paying a pretty percentage of profit on the goods they buy. They are universally prosperous, and in some cases, where by skill and industry they have secured 100 acres, are laying up money. The profits to Dr. Capeheart are large, and show the margin there is in buying land that is loosely farmed, and putting it under intelligent supervision. Of the $52,000 worth of land added to his estates last year, at a valuation of twenty-five dollars per acre, he will realize in rental nine dollars per acre for every acre cultivated, and calculates that in five years at the most the rentals of the land will have paid back what he gave for it.

Amid all this transition from land-owner to tenant there is, besides the corn-raiser, one other steadfast figure, undisturbed by change of relation or condition, holding tenaciously to what it has, though little inclined to push for more. This is Cuffee, the darky farmer. There is no more interesting study in our agriculture than this same dusky, good-natured fellow—humble, patient, shrewd—as he drives into town with his mixed team and his one bag of cotton, on which, drawn by a sympathetic sense of ownership, his whole family is clustered. Living simply and frugally, supplementing his humble meal with a ’possum caught in the night hunt, or a rabbit shot with the old army musket that he captured from some deserted battle-field, and allowing no idlers in the family save the youngsters who “tend de free school,” he defies alike the usurer and the land-shark. In the State of Georgia he owns 680,000 acres of land, cut up into farms that barely average ten acres each, and in the Cotton States he owns 2,680,800 acres, similarly 272divided. From this possession it is impossible to drive him, and to this possession he adds gradually as the seasons go by. He is not ambitious, however, to own large tracts of land, preferring the few acres that he has constantly under his eye, and to every foot of which he feels a rude attachment.

The relations of the negro to cotton are peculiar. Although he spends the most of his life in the cotton field, and this staple is the main crop with which he is concerned, it does not enter into his social life, catch his sentiment, or furnish the occasion for any of his pleasures. None of his homely festivals hinge upon the culture or handling of the great staple. He has his corn-shuckings, his log-rollings, his quilting bees, his threshing jousts, and indeed every special work about the farm is made to yield its element of frolic, except the making of cotton. None of those tuneful melodies with which he beguiles his work or gladdens his play-time acknowledge cotton as a subject or an incident. None of the folklore with which the moonlight nights are whiled away or the fire-lit cabins sanctified, and which finds its home in the corn patch or the meadows, has aught to do with the cotton field. I have never heard a negro song in which the cotton field is made the incidental theme or the subject of allusion, except in a broken perversion of that incomparable ballad, “The Mocking-Bird,” in which the name of the heroine, the tender sentiment, and the tune, which is a favorite one with the negroes, are preserved. This song, with the flower of Southern girlhood that points the regretful tenderness changed into a dusky maiden idealized by early death, with the “mocking-bird singing o’er her grave,” and sung in snatches almost without words or coherence, is popular with the field hands in many parts of the South.

But when we have discussed the questions involved in the planting and culture of the cotton crop, as serious as they are, we have had to do with the least important phase of our subject. The crop of 7,000,000 bales, when ready for the market, is worth in round numbers $300,000,000. 273The same crop when manufactured is worth over $900,000,000. Will the South be content to see the whole of this added value realized by outsiders? If not, how much of the work necessary to create this value will she do within her own borders? She has abundant water-powers, that are never locked a day by ice or lowered by drought, that may be had for a mere song; cheap labor, cheap lands, an unequaled climate, cheap fuel, and the conditions of cheap living. Can these be utilized to any general extent?

It may be premised that there are questions of the utmost importance to the South outside of the manufacture of the lint, which is usually held to cover the whole question of cotton manufacture. There is no particle of the cotton plant that may not be handled to advantage. Mr. Edward Atkinson is authority for the statement that if a plant similar to cotton, but having no lint, could be grown in the North, it would be one of the most profitable of crops. And yet it is true that up to a late date the seed of the cotton has been wholly wasted, and even now the stalk is thrown away as useless. A crop of 7,000,000 bales will yield 3,500,000 tons of cotton seed. Every ounce of this seed is valuable, and in the past few years it has been so handled as to add very heavily to the value of the crop. The first value of the seed is as a fertilizer. It has been discovered of late that the seed that had been formerly allowed to accumulate about the gin-houses in vast piles and rot as waste material, when put upon the fields would add twenty-five to thirty-three per cent. to the crop, and was equal to many of the fertilizers that sell in the market for $25 per ton. In 1869 a mill was established in New Orleans for the purpose of pressing the oil from the cotton seed, and manufacturing the bulk into stock food. Its success was so pronounced that there are now fifty-nine seed-oil mills in the South, costing over $6,000,000, and working up $5,500,000 worth of seed annually. The product of the seed used sells for $9,600,000, so that the mills create a value of $4,500,000 annually. They used only one-seventh of the seed produced in the South. A ton of seed 274which can be worked for $5.50 a ton, and cost originally $8 to $10, making an average cost when worked of $15, is estimated to produce thirty-five gallons of oil worth $11.50, seed-cake worth $5.50, and lint worth $1.50—a total of $18.50, or profit of $3.50, per ton. The oil is of excellent quality, and is used in the making of soaps, stearine, white oils, and when highly refined is a table oil of such flavor and appearance as will deceive the best judges. A quality has been lately discovered in it that makes it valuable as a dye-stuff. It is shipped largely to Europe, 130,000 barrels having been exported last year, chiefly to Antwerp. It is put up carefully, and re-shipped to this country as olive-oil to such an extent that prohibitory duties have been put on it by the Italian government, and it is ruled out of that country. Before it is placed in the oil mill the cotton seed is hulled. The hulls are valuable, and may be used for tanning, made into pulp for paper stock, or used as fuel, and the ashes sold to the soap-makers for the potash they contain. The mass of kernels left after the hulls have been removed and the oil pressed out is made into seed-cake, a most desirable food for stock, which is exported largely to Europe. It is also worked into a fertilizer that yields under analysis $37.50 in value per ton, and can be sold for $22 a ton. It is a notable fact that the ton of seed-cake is even more valuable as a stock food after the $11.50 worth of oil has been taken from it than before, and quite as valuable as a fertilizer. In the four hundred pounds of lint in a bale of cotton there are but four pounds of chemical elements taken from the soil; in the oil there is little more; but in the seed-cake and hulls there are forty pounds of potash and phosphate of lime. But admirable as is the disposition of the cotton seed for manufacture, ample as is the margin of profit, and rapid as has been the growth in the industry, there exists the same disorganization that is noticeable in the handling of the whole cotton question. Although less than one-seventh of the seed raised is needed by the mills, they are unable to get enough to keep them running. The cotton is ginned in such awkward distribution, 275and in such small quantity at any one locality, that it cannot be gathered promptly or cheaply enough for the oil mills. Of the 3,500,000 tons of seed, 500,000 tons only are worked up, and perhaps as much more used for seed. This leaves 2,500,000 tons not worked, and in which is lost nearly $30,000,000 worth of oil. For whether this two and a half million tons is used as a fertilizer or fed to the stock, it would lose none of its value for either purpose if the thirty-five gallons of oil, worth $11.50, were extracted from each ton of it.

Even when the South has passed beyond the proper handling of cotton seed, she has very important ground to cover before she arrives at what is generally known as cotton manufacturing. “The manufacture of this staple,” says a very eminent authority, “is a unit, beginning at the field where the cotton is picked, and ending at the factory from which the cloth is sent to the merchant.” How little this essential truth has been appreciated is apparent from the fact that, until the last census, ginning, pressing, and baling have been classed with the “production” of cotton, and its manufacture held to consist solely of spinning and weaving. Yet there is not a process to which the lint is submitted after it is thrown from the negro’s “pocket” that does not act directly on the quality of the cloth that is finally produced, and on the cheapness and efficiency with which the cloth is made. The separation of the fibre from the seed, the disposition made of the fluffy lint before it is compressed, the compression itself, and the baling of the compressed cotton—these are all delicate operations, involving the integrity of the fibre, the cost of getting it ready for the spindle, and the ease with which it may be spun. Indeed, Mr. Hammond, of South Carolina, a most accomplished writer, contends that the gin-house is the pivotal point around which the whole manufacture of cotton revolves. There is no question that with one-tenth of the money invested in improved gins, cleaners, and pressers that would be required for factories, and with incomparably less risk, the South could make one-half the profit, pound 276for pound, that is made in the mills of New England. Mr. F. C. Morehead, already alluded to in this article, says: “A farmer who produces 500 bales of cotton—200,000 pounds—can, by the expenditure of $1500 on improved gins and cleaners, add one cent per pound to the value of his crop, or $2000. If he added only one-half of one cent, he would get in the first year over fifty per cent. return of his outlay.” Mr. Edward Atkinson—to close this list of authorities—says that the cotton crop is deteriorated ten per cent. at least by being improperly handled from the field to the factory. It is, of course, equally true that a reform in this department of the manufacture of cotton would add ten per cent. to the value of the crop—say $30,000,000—and that, too, without cost to the consumer. Much of the work now done in the mills of New England is occasioned by the errors committed in ginning and packing. Not only would the great part of the dust, sand, and grit that get into cotton from careless handling about the gin-house be kept out if it were properly protected, but that which is in the fibre naturally could be cleaned out more efficiently and with one-third the labor and cost, if it were taken before it has been compressed and baled. Beyond this, the excessive beating and tearing of the fibre necessary to clean it after the sand has been packed in, weaken and impair it, and the sand injures the costly and delicate machinery of the mills.

The capital available to the farmers of any neighborhood in the South is entirely adequate to make thorough reform in this most important, safest, and most profitable department of the manufacture of cotton. A gin-house constructed on the best plan, supplied with the new roller gins lately invented in England, that guarantee to surpass in quantity of cotton ginned as well as quality of lint our rude and imperfect saw gins, having automatic feeders to pass the picking to the gin, and an apron to receive the lint as it comes from the gin and carry it to the beater, or cleaner, where all the motes and dust can be taken from the freshly ginned fibre and then, instead of rolling this 277fleecy mass on a dirty floor, where it would catch every particle of dust and grit, to carry it direct to a Dedrick press that would compress forty pounds within a cubic foot, and reduce the little bale of one hundred and twenty pounds to the consistency of elm-wood, and as little liable to soak water or catch dirt—an establishment of this sort would add one cent per pound to every pound of cotton put through it, and would be worth more as an example than a dozen cotton factories. Annexed to this gin-house should be a huller to take the hulls from the seed and to this huller the seed should be taken as it comes from the gins. Once hulled, the hulls should be fed to the stock, restored to the soil, or sold, and the kernels sent to the nearest oil mill, the oil sold, and the meal fed to sheep or stock, or used as a fertilizer. These improvements, costing little, and within the skill of ordinary laborers, would bring as good a profit as could be realized by a factory involving enormous outlay, great risk, and the utmost skill of management. The importance of reform here will be seen when we state that there is half as much capital—say $70,000,000—invested in machinery for baling, pressing, and ginning cotton as there is invested in the United States in machinery for weaving and spinning it. So great has been the progress in invention, and so sluggish the cotton farmer to reform either his methods or his machinery, that experts agree that the ginning, pressing, and baling of the crop could be done with one-half or possibly one-third of the labor and cost of the present, and done so much better that the product would be worth ten per cent. more than it now commands, if the best machinery were bought, and the best methods employed.

The urgency and the magnitude of the reforms needed in the field and about the gin-house have not deterred the South from aspiring to spin and weave at least the bulk of the cotton crop. Indeed, there is nothing that so appeals to Southern pride as to urge the possibility that in time the manufacture of this crop as well as the crop itself shall be a monopoly of the cotton belt. As the South grows 278richer and the conditions of competition are nearer equal, there will be a tendency to place new machinery intended for the manufacture of cotton near the field in which the staple is growing; but the extent to which this tendency will control, or the time in which it will become controlling, is beyond the scope of this article. We shall rather deal with things as they are, or are likely to be in the very near future. We note, then, that in the past ten years the South has more than doubled the amount of cotton manufactured within her borders. In 1870, there were used 45,032,866 pounds of cotton; in 1880, 101,937,256 pounds. In 1870, there were 11,602 looms and 416,983 spindles running; in 1880, 15,222 looms and 714,078 spindles. This array of figures hardly indicates fairly the progress that the South will make in the next ten years, for the reason that the factories in which these spindles are turned are experiments in most of the localities in which they are placed. It is the invariable rule that when a factory is built in any city or country it is easier to raise the capital for a subsequent enterprise than for the first one. At Augusta, Georgia, for instance, where the manufacture of cloth has been demonstrated a success, the progress is remarkable. In the past two years two new mills, the Enterprise and Sibly, with 30,000 spindles each, have been established; and a third, the King, has been organized, with a capital of $1,000,000 and 30,000 spindles. The capital for these mills was furnished about one-fourth in Augusta, and the balance in the North. With these mills running, Augusta will have 170,000 spindles, and will have added about 70,000 spindles to the last census returns. In South Carolina the same rapid growth is resulting from the establishment of one or two successful mills; and in Columbus, Georgia, the influence of one successful mill, the Eagle and Phœnix, has raised the local consumption of cotton from 1927 bales in 1870 to 19,000 bales in 1880. In Atlanta, Georgia, the first mill had hardly been finished before the second was started; a third is projected; and two companies have secured charters for the building of a 279forty-mile canal to furnish water-power and factory fronts to capital in and about the city. These things are mentioned simply to show that the growth of cotton manufacture in the South is sympathetic, and that each factory established is an argument for others. There is no investment that has proved so uniformly successful in the South as that put into cotton factories. An Augusta factory just advertises eight per cent. semi-annual dividend; the Eagle and Phœnix, of Columbus, earned twenty-five per cent. last year; the Augusta factory for eleven years made an average of eighteen per cent. per annum. The net earnings of the Langley Mills was $480,000 for its first eight years on a capital of $400,000, or an average of fifteen per cent. a year. The earnings of sixty Southern mills, large and small, selected at random, for three years, averaged fourteen per cent. per annum.

Indeed, an experience varied and extended enough to give it authority teaches that there is absolutely no reason why the South should not profitably quadruple its capacity for the manufacture of cotton every year in the next five years except the lack of capital. The lack of skilled labor has proved to be a chimerical fear, as the mills bring enough of skilled labor to any community in which they are established to speedily educate up a native force. It may be true that for the most delicate work the South will for a while lack the efficient labor of New England that has been trained for generations, but it is equally true that no factory in the South has ever been stopped a week for the lack of suitable labor. The operatives can live cheaper than at the North, and can be had for lower wages. As sensible a man as Mr. Edward Atkinson claimed lately that in the cotton country proper a person could not keep at continuous in-door labor during the summer. The answer to this is that during the present summer, the hottest ever known, not a Southern mill has stopped for one day or hour on account of the heat, and this, too, when scores of establishments through the Western and Northern cities were closed. One of the strongest points of advantage the 280South has is that for no extreme of climate, acting on the machinery, the operatives, or the water-supply, is any of her mills forced to suspend work at any season. Beyond this, Southern water-powers can be purchased low, and the land adjacent at a song; there are no commissions to pay on the purchase of cotton, no freight on its transportation, and it is submitted to the picker before it has undergone serious compression. Mr. W. H. Young, of Columbus, perhaps the best Southern authority, estimates that the Columbus mills have an advantage of nine-tenths of a cent per pound over their Northern competitors, and this in a mill of 1600 looms will amount to nine per cent. on the entire capital, or $120,099. The Southern mills, without exception, pulled through the years of depression that followed the panic of 1873, paying regular dividends of from six per cent. to fifteen, and, it may be said, have thoroughly won the confidence of investors North and South. The one thing that has retarded the growth of manufacturing in the Cotton States, the lack of capital, is being overcome with astonishing rapidity. Within the past two years considerably over $100,000,000 of Northern capital has been subscribed, in lots of $1,000,000 and upward, for the purchase and development of Southern railroads and mining properties; the total will probably run to $120,000,000. There is now being expended in the building of new railroads from Atlanta, Georgia, as headquarters, $17,800,000, not one dollar of which was subscribed by Georgians or by the State of Georgia. The men who invest these vast amounts in the South are interested in the general development of the section into which they have gone with their enterprise, and they readily double any local subscription for any legitimate local improvement. By the sale of these railroad properties to Northern syndicates at advanced prices the local stockholders have realized heavily in cash, and this surplus is seeking manufacturing investment. The prospect is that the next ten years will witness a growth in this direction beyond what even the most sanguine predict.

281The International Cotton Exposition, opening October 5, of the present year, in Atlanta, must have a tremendous influence in improving the culture, handling, and manufacture of the great staple of the South. The Southern people do not lack the desire to keep abreast with improvement and invention, but on the contrary have shown precipitate eagerness in reaching out for the best and newest. Before the war, when the Southern planter had a little surplus money he bought a slave. Since the war, he buys a piece of machinery. The trouble has been that he was forced to buy without any guide as to the value of what he bought, or its adaptability to the purposes for which he intended it. The consequence is that the farms are littered with ill-adapted and inferior implements and machines, representing twice the investment that, intelligently placed, would provide an equipment that with half the labor would do better work. It is the purpose of the exposition to bring the farmers face to face with the very best machinery that invention and experience have produced. The buildings themselves will be models each of its kind, and will represent the judgment of experts as to cheapness, durability, safety and general excellence. The past and present will be contrasted in the exhibition. The old loom on which the rude fabrics of our forefathers were woven by hands gentle and loving will be put against the more elaborate looms of to-day. The spinning wheel of the past, that filled all the country-side with its drowsy music, as the dusky spinner advanced and retreated, with not ungraceful courtesy and a swinging sidewise shuffle, will find its sweet voice lost in the hum of modern spindles. The cycle of gins and ginning will be there completed, invention coming back, after a half-century of trial with the brutal saw, to a perfected variation of the patient and gentle roller with which the precious fleece was pulled from the seed years upon years ago. There are the most wonderful machines promised, including a half-dozen that claim to have solved the problem—supposed to be past finding out—of picking cotton by machinery. Large fields flank the 282buildings, and on these are tested the various kinds of cotton seed, fed by the various kinds of fertilizers, each put in fair competition with the others.

One of the most important special inventions at the exposition will be the Clement attachment—a contrivance for spinning the cotton as it comes from the gin. The invention is simply the marriage of the gin to the spindle. These are joined by two large cards that take the fibre from the gin, straighten it out, and pass it directly to the spinning boards, where it is made into the best of yarns. The announcement of this invention two years ago created very great excitement. If it proved a success, the whole system of cotton manufacture was changed. If the cotton could be spun directly from the gin, all the expense of baling would be eliminated, and four or five expensive steps in the process of cotton from field to cloth would be rendered unnecessary. Better than all, the South argued, the Clement attachment brought the heaviest part of manufacturing to the cotton field, from which it could never be divorced. By the simple joining of the spindles to the gin, the cotton, worth only eight or nine cents as baled lint, in which shape it had been shipped North, became worth sixteen to eighteen cents as yarns. The home value of the crop was thus to be doubled, and by such process as New England could never capture. Several of the attachments were put to work, and were visited by thousands. They produced an excellent quality of yarns, and made a clear profit of two cents per pound on the cotton treated. The investment required was small, and it was held that $5000 would certainly bring a net annual profit of $2200. Many of these little mills are still running, and profitably; but difficulties between the owner and his agents, and a general suspicion raised by his declining to put the machine on its merits before certain agricultural associations, prevented its general adoption. That this attachment, or some machine of similar character for spinning the cotton into yarns near the field where it is grown, will be generally adopted through the South in the near future, I 283have not a particle of doubt; that the exposition with its particular exhibits on this point will hasten the day, there is every reason to hope. There are many yarn mills already scattered through the South, but none of them promise the results that will be achieved when the spindles are wedded to the gin, and the same motive power drives both, carrying the cotton without delay or compression from seed to thread.

Such, then, in brief and casual review, is King Cotton, his subjects, and his realm. Vast as his concerns and possessions may appear at present, they are but the hint of what the future will develop. The best authority puts the amount of cotton goods manufactured in America at about fourteen pounds per head of population, of which twelve pounds per capita are retained for home consumption, leaving only a small margin for export. On the Continent there is but one country, probably—Switzerland—that manufactures more cotton goods than it consumes; and the Continent demands from Great Britain an amount of cotton cloth that, added to its own supply, exhausts nearly one-half the product of the English mills. It is hardly probable that, under the sharp competition of American mills, the capacity of either England or the Continent for producing ordinary cotton cloths will be greatly increased. But, with the yield of the English and Continental mills at least measurably defined and now rapidly absorbed, there is an enormous demand for machine-made cotton fabrics springing from new and virtually exhaustless sources. The continents of Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, and the countries lying between the two American continents, contain more than 800,000,000 people, according to general authority. This immense population is clothed in cotton almost exclusively, and almost as exclusively in hand-made fabrics. That the cheap and superior products of the modern factory will displace these hand-made goods as rapidly as they can be delivered upon competing terms, cannot be doubted. To supply China alone with cotton fabrics made by machine, deducting 284the 35,000,000 people or thereabout already supplied, and estimating the demand of the remainder at five pounds per capita, would require 3,000,000 additional bales of cotton and 30,000,000 additional spindles. The goods needed for this demand will be the lower grades of cottons, for the manufacture of which the South is especially adapted, and in which there is serious reason to believe she has demonstrated she has advantages over New England. The demand from Mexico, Central and South America, will grow into immense proportions as cotton and its products cheapen under increased supply, and improved methods of culture and manufacture. The South will be called upon to furnish the cotton to meet the calls of the peoples enumerated. That she can easily do so has been made plain by previous estimate, but it may be added that hardly three per cent. of the cotton area is now devoted to cotton, and that on one-tenth of a single Cotton State—Texas—double the present crop might be raised. Whether or not she will do this profitably, and without destroying the happiness and prosperity of her former population, and building up a land-holding oligarchy, depends on a reform in her system of credit and her system of planting. The first is being effected by the introduction of capital that recognizes farming lands as a safe risk worthy of a low percentage of interest; the latter must depend on the intelligence of her people, the force of a few bright examples, and the wisdom of her leaders. She will be called upon to supply a large proportion of the manufactured goods for this new and limitless demand. It has already been shown that she has felicitous conditions for this work.

IT is strange that during the discussion of the negro question, which has been wide and pertinent, no one has stood up to speak the mind of the South. In this discussion there has been much of truth and more of error—something of perverseness, but more of misapprehension—not a little of injustice, but perhaps less of mean intention.

Amid it all, the South has been silent.

There has been, perhaps, good reason for this silence. The problem under debate is a tremendous one. Its right solution means peace, prosperity, and happiness to the South. A mistake, even in the temper in which it is approached or the theory upon which its solution is attempted, would mean detriment, that at best would be serious, and might easily be worse. Hence the South has pondered over this problem, earnestly seeking with all her might the honest and the safe way out of its entanglements, and saying little because there was but little to which she felt safe in committing herself. Indeed, there was another reason why she did not feel called upon to obtrude her opinions. The people of the North, proceeding by the right of victorious arms, had themselves undertaken to settle the negro question. From the Emancipation Proclamation to the Civil Rights Bill they hurried with little let or hindrance, holding the negro in the meanwhile under a sort of tutelage, from part in which his former masters were practically excluded. Under this state of things the South had little to do but watch and learn.

We have now passed fifteen years of experiment. Certain broad principles have been established as wise and just.

286The South has something to say which she can say with confidence. There is no longer impropriety in her speaking or lack of weight in her words. The people of the United States have, by their suffrages, remitted to the Southern people, temporarily at least, control of the race question. The decision of the Supreme Court on the Civil Rights Bill leaves practically to their adjustment important issues that were, until that decision was rendered, covered by straight and severe enactment. These things deepen the responsibility of the South, increase its concern, and confront it with a problem to which it must address itself promptly and frankly. Where it has been silent, it now should speak. The interest of every American in the honorable and equitable settlement of this question is second only to the interest of those specially—and fortunately, we believe—charged with its adjustment. “What will you do with it?” is a question any man may now ask the South, and to which the South should make frank and full reply.

It is important that this reply shall be plain and straightforward. Above all things it must carry the genuine convictions of the people it represents. On this subject and at this time the South cannot afford to be misunderstood. Upon the clear and general apprehension of her position and of her motives and purpose everything depends. She cannot let pass unchallenged a single utterance that, spoken in her name, misstates her case or her intention. It is to protest against just such injustice that this article is written.

In a lately printed article, Mr. George W. Cable, writing in the name of the Southern people, confesses judgment on points that they still defend, and commits them to a line of thought from which they must forever dissent. In this article, as in his works, the singular tenderness and beauty of which have justly made him famous, Mr. Cable is sentimental rather than practical. But the reader, enchained by the picturesque style and misled by the engaging candor with which the author admits the shortcomings of “We of the South,” and the kindling enthusiasm with which he 287tells how “We of the South” must make reparation, is apt to assume that it is really the soul of the South that breathes through Mr. Cable’s repentant sentences. It is not my purpose to discuss Mr. Cable’s relations to the people for whom he claims to speak. Born in the South, of Northern parents, he appears to have had little sympathy with his Southern environment, as in 1882 he wrote, “To be in New England would be enough for me. I was there once,—a year ago,—and it seemed as if I had never been home till then.” It will be suggested that a man so out of harmony with his neighbors as to say, even after he had fought side by side with them on the battle-field, that he never felt at home until he had left them, cannot speak understandingly of their views on so vital a subject as that under discussion. But it is with his statement rather than his personality that we have to deal. Does he truly represent the South? We reply that he does not! There may be here and there in the South a dreaming theorist who subscribes to Mr. Cable’s teachings. We have seen no signs of one. Among the thoughtful men of the South,—the men who felt that all brave men might quit fighting when General Lee surrendered,—who, enshrining in their hearts the heroic memories of the cause they had lost, in good faith accepted the arbitrament of the sword to which they had appealed,—who bestirred themselves cheerfully amid the ruins of their homes, and set about the work of rehabilitation,—who have patched and mended and builded anew, and fashioned out of pitiful resource a larger prosperity than they ever knew before,—who have set their homes on the old red hills, and staked their honor and prosperity and the peace and well-being of the children who shall come after them on the clear and equitable solution of every social, industrial, or political problem that concerns the South,—among these men, who control and will continue to control, I do know, there is general protest against Mr. Cable’s statement of the case, and universal protest against his suggestions for the future. The mind of these men I shall attempt to speak, maintaining my right to speak for them with the pledge that, having 288exceptional means for knowing their views on this subject, and having spared no pains to keep fully informed thereof, I shall write down nothing in their name on which I have found even a fractional difference of opinion.

A careful reading of Mr. Cable’s article discloses the following argument: The Southern people have deliberately and persistently evaded the laws forced on them for the protection of the freedman; this evasion has been the result of prejudices born of and surviving the institution of slavery, the only way to remove which is to break down every distinction between the races; and now the best thought of the South, alarmed at the withdrawal of the political machinery that forced the passage of the protective laws, which withdrawal tempts further and more intolerable evasions, is moving to forbid all further assortment of the races and insist on their intermingling in all places and in all relations. The first part of this argument is a matter of record, and, from the Southern stand-point, mainly a matter of reputation. It can bide its time. The suggestion held in its conclusion is so impossible, so mischievous, and, in certain aspects, so monstrous, that it must be met at once.

It is hard to think about the negro with exactness. His helplessness, his generations of enslavement, his unique position among the peoples of the earth, his distinctive color, his simple, lovable traits,—all these combine to hasten opinion into conviction where he is the subject of discussion. Three times has this tendency brought about epochal results in his history. First, it abolished slavery. For this all men are thankful, even those who, because of the personal injustice and violence of the means by which it was brought about, opposed its accomplishment. Second, it made him a voter. This, done more in a sense of reparation than in judgment, is as final as the other. The North demanded it; the South expected it; all acquiesced in it, and, wise or unwise, it will stand. Third, it fixed by enactment his social and civil rights. And here for the first time the revolution faltered. Up to this point the way had been 289plain, the light clear, and the march at quick-step. Here the line halted. The way was lost; there was hesitation, division, and uncertainty. Knowing not which way to turn, and enveloped in doubt, the revolutionists heard the retreat sounded by the Supreme Court with small reluctance, and, to use Mr. Cable’s words, “bewildered by complication, vexed by many a blunder,” retired from the field. See, then, the progress of this work. The first step, right by universal agreement, would stand if the law that made it were withdrawn. The second step, though irrevocable, raises doubts as to its wisdom. The third, wrong in purpose, has failed in execution. It stands denounced as null by the highest court, as inoperative by general confession, and as unwise by popular verdict. Let us take advantage of this halt in the too rapid revolution, and see exactly where we stand and what is best for us to do. The situation is critical. The next moment may formulate the work of the next twenty years. The tremendous forces of the revolution, unspent and still terrible, are but held in arrest. Launch them mistakenly, chaos may come. Wrong-headedness may be as fatal now as wrong-heartedness. Clear views, clear statement, and clear understanding are the demands of the hour. Given these, the common sense and courage of the American people will make the rest easy.

Let it be understood in the beginning, then, that the South will never adopt Mr. Cable’s suggestion of the social intermingling of the races. It can never be driven into accepting it. So far from there being a growing sentiment in the South in favor of the indiscriminate mixing of the races, the intelligence of both races is moving farther from that proposition day by day. It is more impossible (if I may shade a superlative) now than it was ten years ago; it will be less possible ten years hence. Neither race wants it. The interest, as the inclination, of both races is against it. Here the issue with Mr. Cable is made up. He denounces any assortment of the races as unjust, and demands that white and black shall intermingle everywhere. The South replies that the assortment of the races is wise and 290proper, and stands on the platform of equal accommodation for each race, but separate.

The difference is an essential one. Deplore or defend it as we may, an antagonism is bred between the races when they are forced into mixed assemblages. This sinks out of sight, if not out of existence, when each race moves in its own sphere. Mr. Cable admits this feeling, but doubts that it is instinctive. In my opinion it is instinctive—deeper than prejudice or pride, and bred in the bone and blood. It would make itself felt even in sections where popular prejudice runs counter to its manifestation. If in any town in Wisconsin or Vermont there was equal population of whites and blacks, and schools, churches, hotels, and theaters were in common, this instinct would assuredly develop; the races would separate, and each race would hasten the separation. Let me give an example that touches this supposition closely. Bishop Gilbert Haven, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, many years ago came to the South earnestly, and honestly, we may believe, devoted to breaking up the assortment of the races. He was backed by powerful influences in the North. He was welcomed by resident Northerners in the South (then in control of Southern affairs) as an able and eloquent exponent of their views. His first experiment toward mixing the races was made in the church—surely the most propitious field. Here the fraternal influence of religion emphasized his appeals for the brotherhood of the races. What was the result? After the first month his church was decimated. The Northern whites and the Southern blacks left it in squads. The dividing influences were mutual. The stout bishop contended with prayer and argument and threat against the inevitable, but finally succumbed. Two separate churches were established, and each race worshiped to itself. There had been no collision, no harsh words, no discussion even. Each race simply obeyed its instinct, that spoke above the appeal of the bishop and dominated the divine influences that pulsed from pew to pew. Time and again did the bishop force the experiment. Time and 291again he failed. At last he was driven to the confession that but one thing could effect what he had tried so hard to bring about, and that was miscegenation. A few years of experiment would force Mr. Cable to the same conclusion.

The same experiment was tried on a larger scale by the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) when it established its churches in the South after the war. It essayed to bring the races together, and in its conferences and its churches there was no color line. Prejudice certainly did not operate to make a division here. On the contrary, the whites and blacks of this church were knit together by prejudice, pride, sentiment, political and even social policy. Underneath all this was a race instinct, obeying which, silently, they drifted swiftly apart. While white Methodists of the church North and of the church South, distant from each other in all but the kinship of race and worship, were struggling to effect once more a union of the churches that had been torn apart by a quarrel over slavery, so that in every white conference and every white church on all this continent white Methodists could stand in restored brotherhood, the Methodist Church (North) agreed, without serious protest, to a separation of its Southern branch into two conferences of whites and of blacks, and into separate congregations where the proportion of either race was considerable. Was it without reason—it certainly was not through prejudice—that this Church, while seeking anew fusion with its late enemies, consented to separate from its new friends?

It was the race instinct that spoke there. It spoke not with prejudice, but against it. It spoke there as it speaks always and everywhere—as it has spoken for two thousand years. And it spoke to the reason of each race. Millaud, in voting in the French Convention for the beheading of Louis XVI., said: “If death did not exist, it would be necessary to-day to invent it.” So of this instinct. It is the pledge of the integrity of each race, and of peace between the races. Without it, there might be a breaking down of all lines of division and a thorough intermingling of whites and blacks. 292This once accomplished, the lower and the weaker elements of the races would begin to fuse and the process of amalgamation would have begun. This would mean the disorganization of society. An internecine war would be precipitated. The whites, at any cost and at any hazard, would maintain the clear integrity and dominance of the Anglo-Saxon blood. They understand perfectly that the debasement of their own race would not profit the humble and sincere race with which their lot is cast, and that the hybrid would not gain what either race lost. Even if the vigor and the volume of the Anglo-Saxon blood would enable it to absorb the African current, and after many generations recover its own strength and purity, not all the powers of earth could control the unspeakable horrors that would wait upon the slow process of clarification. Easier far it would be to take the population of central New York, intermingle with it an equal percentage of Indians, and force amalgamation between the two. Let us review the argument. If Mr. Cable is correct in assuming that there is no instinct that keeps the two races separate in the South, then there is no reason for doubting that if intermingled they would fuse. Mere prejudice would not long survive perfect equality and social intermingling; and the prejudice once gone, intermarrying would begin. Then, if there is a race instinct in either race that resents intimate association with the other, it would be unwise to force such association when there are easy and just alternatives. If there is no such instinct, the mixing of the races would mean amalgamation, to which the whites will never submit, and to which neither race should submit. So that in either case, whether the race feeling is instinct or prejudice, we come to but one conclusion: The white and black races in the South must walk apart. Concurrent their courses may go—ought to go—will go—but separate. If instinct did not make this plain in a flash, reason would spell it out letter by letter.

Now, let us see. We hold that there is an instinct, ineradicable and positive, that will keep the races apart, that 293would keep the races apart if the problem were transferred to Illinois or to Maine, and that will resist every effort of appeal, argument, or force to bring them together. We add in perfect frankness, however, that if no such instinct existed, or if the South had reasonable doubt of its existence, it would, by every means in its power, so strengthen the race prejudice that it would do the work and hold the stubbornness and strength of instinct. The question that confronts us at this point is: Admitted this instinct, that gathers each race to itself. Then, do you believe it possible to carry forward on the same soil and under the same laws two races equally free, practically equal in numbers, and yet entirely distinct and separate? This is a momentous question. It involves a problem that, all things considered, is without a precedent or parallel. Can the South carry this problem in honor and in peace to an equitable solution? We reply that for ten years the South has been doing this very thing, and with at least apparent success. No impartial and observant man can say that in the present aspect of things there is cause for alarm, or even for doubt. In the experience of the past few years there is assuredly reason for encouragement. There may be those who discern danger in the distant future. We do not. Beyond the apprehensions which must for a long time attend a matter so serious, we see nothing but cause for congratulation. In the common sense and the sincerity of the negro, no less than in the intelligence and earnestness of the whites, we find the problem simplifying. So far from the future bringing trouble, we feel confident that another decade or so, confirming the experience of the past ten years, will furnish the solution to be accepted of all men.

Let us examine briefly what the South has been doing, and study the attitude of the races toward each other. Let us do this, not so much to vindicate the past as to clear the way for the future. Let us see what the situation teaches. There must be in the experience of fifteen years something definite and suggestive. We begin with the 294schools and school management, as the basis of the rest.

Every Southern State has a common-school system, and in every State separate schools are provided for the races. Almost every city of more than five thousand inhabitants has a public-school system, and in every city the schools for whites and blacks are separate. There is no exception to this rule that I can find. In many cases the law creating this system requires that separate schools shall be provided for the races. This plan works admirably. There is no friction in the administration of the schools, and no suspicion as to the ultimate tendency of the system. The road to school is clear, and both races walk therein with confidence. The whites, assured that the school will not be made the hot-bed of false and pernicious ideas, or the scene of unwise associations, support the system cordially, and insist on perfect equality in grade and efficiency. The blacks, asking no more than this, fill the schools with alert and eager children. So far from feeling debased by the separate-school system, they insist that the separation shall be carried further, and the few white teachers yet presiding over negro schools supplanted by negro teachers. The appropriations for public schools are increased year after year, and free education grows constantly in strength and popularity. Cities that were afraid to commit themselves to free-schools while mixed schools were a possibility commenced building school-houses as soon as separate schools were assured. In 1870 the late Benjamin H. Hill found his matchless eloquence unable to carry the suggestion of negro education into popular tolerance. Ten years later nearly one million black children attended free-schools, supported by general taxation. Though the whites pay nineteen-twentieths of the tax, they insist that the blacks shall share its advantages equally. The schools for each race are opened on the same day and closed on the same day. Neither is run a single day at the expense of the other. The negroes are satisfied with the situation. I am aware that some of the Northern teachers of negro high-schools 295and universities will controvert this. Touching their opinion, I have only to say that it can hardly be considered fair or conservative. Under the forcing influence of social ostracism, they have reasoned impatiently and have been helped to conclusions by quick sympathies or resentments. Driven back upon themselves and hedged in by suspicion or hostility, their service has become a sort of martyrdom, which has swiftly stimulated opinion into conviction and conviction into fanaticism. I read in a late issue of Zion’s Herald a letter from one of these teachers, who declined, on the conductor’s request, to leave the car in which she was riding, and which was set apart exclusively for negroes. The conductor, therefore, presumed she was a quadroon, and stated his presumption in answer to the inquiry of a young negro man who was with her. She says of this:

“Truly, a glad thrill went through my heart—a thrill of pride. This great autocrat had pronounced me as not only in sympathy, but also one in blood, with the truest, tenderest, and noblest race that dwells on earth.”

If this quotation, which is now before me, over the writer’s name, suggests that she and those of her colleagues who agree with her have narrowed within their narrowing environment, and acquired artificial enthusiasm under their unnatural conditions, so that they must be unsafe as advisers and unfair as witnesses, the sole purpose for which it is introduced will have been served. This suggestion does not reach all Northern teachers of negro schools. Some have taken broader counsels, awakened wider sympathies, and, as a natural result, hold more moderate views. The influence of the extremer faction is steadily diminishing. Set apart, as small and curious communities are set here and there in populous States, stubborn and stiff for a while, but overwhelmed at last and lost in the mingling currents, these dissenting spots will be ere long blotted out and forgotten. The educational problem, which is their special care, has already been settled, and the settlement accepted with a heartiness that precludes the possibility of its disturbance. From the stand-point of either race the experiment 296of distinct but equal schools for the white and black children of the South has demonstrated its wisdom, its policy, and its justice, if any experiment ever made plain its wisdom in the hands of finite man.

I quote on this subject Gustavus J. Orr, one of the wisest and best of men, and lately elected, by spontaneous movement, president of the National Educational Association. He says: “The race question in the schools is already settled. We give the negroes equal advantages, but separate schools. This plan meets the reason and satisfies the instinct of both races. Under it we have spent over five million dollars in Georgia, and the system grows in strength constantly.” I asked if the negroes wanted mixed schools. His reply was prompt: “They do not. I have questioned them carefully on this point, and they make but one reply: “They want their children in their own schools and under their own teachers.” I asked what would be the effect of mixed schools. “I could not maintain the Georgia system one year. Both races would protest against it. My record as a public-school man is known. I have devoted my life to the work of education. But I am so sure of the evils that would come from mixed schools that, even if they were possible, I would see the whole educational system swept away before I would see them established. There is an instinct that gathers each race about itself. It is as strong in the blacks as in the whites, though it has not asserted itself so strongly. It is making itself manifest, since the blacks are organizing a social system of their own. It has long controlled them in their churches, and it is now doing so in their schools.”

In churches, as in schools, the separation is perfect. The negroes, in all denominations in which their membership is an appreciable percentage of the whole, have their own churches, congregations, pastors, conferences, bishops, and their own missionaries. There is not the slightest antagonism between them and the white churches of the same denomination. On the contrary, there is sympathetic interest and the utmost friendliness. The separation 297is recognized as not only instinctive but wise. There is no disposition to disturb it, and least of all on the part of the negro. The church is with him the center of social life, and there he wants to find his own people and no others. Let me quote just here a few sentences from a speech delivered by a genuine black negro at the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (South), in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1880. He is himself a pastor of the African Methodist Church, and came as a fraternal delegate. This extract from a speech, largely extempore, is a fair specimen of negro eloquence, as it is a fair evidence of the feeling of that people toward their white neighbors. He said:

“Mr. Chairman, Bishops, and Brethren in Christ: Let me here state a circumstance which has just now occurred. When in the vestry, there we were consulting your committee, among whom is your illustrious Christian Governor, the Honorable A. H. Colquitt [applause], feeling an unusual thirst, and expecting in a few moments to appear before you, thoughtlessly I asked him if there was water to drink. He, looking about the room, answered, ‘There is none; I will get you some.’ I insisted not; but presently it was brought by a brother minister, and handed me by the Governor. I said: ‘Governor, you must allow me to deny myself this distinguished favor, as it recalls so vividly the episode of the warrior king of Israel, when, with parched lips, he cried from the rocky cave of Adullam, ‘Oh! that one would give me drink of water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate.’ And when three of his valiant captains broke through the host of the enemy, and returned to him with the water for which his soul was longing, regarding it as the water of life, he would not drink it, but poured it out to the Lord.’ [Applause.] So may this transcendent emblem of purity and love, from the hand of your most honored co-laborer and friend of the human race, ever remain as a memorial unto the Lord of the friendship existing between the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the African Methodist Episcopal Church upon this the first exchange of formal fraternal greeting. [Applause.]

“In the name of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,—and I declare the true sentiments of thousands,—I say, that for your Church and your race we cherish the kindliest feelings that ever found a lodgment in the human breast. [Applause.] Of this you need not be told. Let speak your former missionaries among us, who now hold seats upon this floor, and whose hearts have so often burned within them as they have seen the word sown by them in such humble soil burst forth into abundant prosperity. Ask the hundred thousand of your laymen 298who still survive the dead, how we conducted ourselves as tillers of the soil, as servants about the dwelling, and as common worshipers in the temple of God! Ask your battle-scarred veterans, who left their all to the mercy of relentless circumstances, and went, in answer to the clarion call of the trumpet, to the gigantic and unnatural strife of the second revolution! Ask them who looked at their interests at home [great cheering]; who raised their earthworks upon the field; who buried the young hero so far away from his home, or returned his ashes to the stricken hearts which hung breathless upon the hour; who protected their wives and little ones from the ravages of wild beasts, and the worse ravages of famine! And the answer is returned from a million heaving bosoms, as a monument of everlasting remembrance to the benevolence of the colored race in America. [Immense applause.] And these are they who greet you to-day, through their chief organization, the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America. [Loud and continued applause.]

“And now, though the yoke which bound the master and the slave together in such close and mutual responsibility has been shivered by the rude shock of war, we find ourselves still standing by your side as natural allies against an unfriendly world.” [Applause.]

In their social institutions, as in their churches and schools, the negroes have obeyed their instinct and kept apart from the whites. They have their own social and benevolent societies, their own military companies, their own orders of Masons and Odd Fellows. They rally about these organizations with the greatest enthusiasm and support them with the greatest liberality. If it were proposed to merge them with white organizations of the same character, with equal rights guaranteed in all, the negroes would interpose the stoutest objection. Their tastes, associations, and inclinations—their instincts—lead them to gather their race about social centers of its own. I am tempted into trying to explain here what I have never yet seen a stranger to the South able to understand. The feeling that, by mutual action, separates whites and blacks when they are thrown together in social intercourse is not a repellent influence in the harsh sense of that word. It is centripetal rather than centrifugal. It is attractive about separate centers rather than expulsive from a common center. There is no antagonism, for example, between white 299and black military companies. On occasions they parade in the same street, and have none of the feeling that exists between Orangemen and Catholics. Of course the good sense of each race and the mutual recognition of the possible dangers of the situation have much to do with maintaining the good-will between the distinct races. The fact that in his own church or society the negro has more freedom, more chance for leadership and for individual development, than he could have in association with the whites, has more to do with it. But beyond all this is the fact that, in the segregation of the races, blacks as well as whites obey a natural instinct, which, always granting that they get equal justice and equal advantages, they obey without the slightest ill-nature or without any sense of disgrace. They meet the white people in all the avenues of business. They work side by side with the white bricklayer or carpenter in perfect accord and friendliness. When the trowel or the hammer is laid aside, the laborers part, each going his own way. Any attempt to carry the comradeship of the day into private life would be sternly resisted by both parties in interest.

We have seen that in churches, schools, and social organizations the whites and blacks are moving along separately but harmoniously, and that the “assortment of the races,” which has been described as shameful and unjust, is in most part made by the instinct of each race, and commands the hearty assent of both. Let us now consider the question of public carriers. On this point the South has been sharply criticised, and not always without reason. It is manifestly wrong to make a negro pay as much for a railroad ticket as a white man pays, and then force him to accept inferior accommodations. It is equally wrong to force a decent negro into an indecent car, when there is room for him or for her elsewhere. Public sentiment in the South has long recognized this, and has persistently demanded that the railroad managers should provide cars for the negroes equal in every respect to those set apart for the whites, and that these cars should 300be kept clean and orderly. In Georgia a State law requires all public roads or carriers to provide equal accommodation for each race, and failure to do so is made a penal offense. In Tennessee a negro woman lately gained damages by proving that she had been forced to take inferior accommodation on a train. The railroads have, with few exceptions, come up to the requirements of the law. Where they fail, they quickly feel the weight of public opinion, and shock the sense of public justice. This very discussion, I am bound to say, will lessen such failures in the future. On four roads, in my knowledge, even better has been done than the law requires. The car set apart for the negroes is made exclusive. No whites are permitted to occupy it. A white man who strays into this car is politely told that it is reserved for the negroes. He has the information repeated two or three times, smiles, and retreats. This rule works admirably and will win general favor. There are a few roads that make no separate provision for the races, but announce that any passenger can ride on any car. Here the “assortment” of the races is done away with, and here it is that most of the outrages of which we hear occur. On these roads the negro has no place set apart for him. As a rule, he is shy about asserting himself, and he usually finds himself in the meanest corners of the train. If he forces himself into the ladies’ car, he is apt to provoke a collision. It is on just one of these trains where the assortment of the passengers is left to chance that a respectable negro woman is apt to be forced to ride in a car crowded with negro convicts. Such a thing would be impossible where the issue is fairly met, and a car, clean, orderly, and exclusive, is provided for each race. The case could not be met by grading the tickets and the accommodations. Such a plan would bring together in the second or third class car just the element of both races between whom prejudice runs highest, and from whom the least of tact or restraint might be expected. On the railroads, as elsewhere, the solution of the race problem is, equal advantages for the same money,—equal in comfort, safety, and exclusiveness,—but separate.

301There remains but one thing further to consider—the negro in the jury-box. It is assumed generally that the negro has no representation in the courts. This is a false assumption. In the United States courts he usually makes more than half the jury. As to the State courts, I can speak particularly as to Georgia. I assume that she does not materially differ from the other States. In Georgia the law requires that commissioners shall prepare the jury-list for each county by selection from the upright, intelligent, and experienced citizens of the county. This provision was put into the Constitution by the negro convention of reconstruction days. Under its terms no reasonable man would have expected to see the list made up of equal percentage of the races. Indeed, the fewest number of negroes were qualified under the law. Consequently, but few appeared on the lists. The number, as was to be expected, is steadily increasing. In Fulton County there are seventy-four negroes whose names are on the lists, and the commissioners, I am informed, have about doubled this number for the present year. These negroes make good jurymen, and are rarely struck by attorneys, no matter what the client or cause may be. About the worst that can be charged against the jury system in Georgia is that the commissioners have made jurors of negroes only when they had qualified themselves to intelligently discharge a juror’s duties. In few quarters of the South, however, is the negro unable to get full and exact justice in the courts, whether the jury be white or black. Immediately after the war, when there was general alarm and irritation, there may have been undue severity in sentences and extreme rigor of prosecution. But the charge that the people of the South have, in their deliberate and later moments prostituted justice to the oppression of this dependent people, is as false as it is infamous. There is abundant belief that the very helplessness of the negro in court has touched the heart and conscience of many a jury, when the facts should have held them impervious. In the city in which this is written, a negro, at midnight, on an unfrequented street, murdered a popular 302young fellow, over whose grave a monument was placed by popular subscription. The only witnesses of the killing were the friends of the murdered boy. Had the murderer been a white man, it is believed he would have been convicted. He was acquitted by the white jury, and has since been convicted of a murderous assault on a person of his own color. Similarly, a young white man, belonging to one of the leading families of the State, was hanged for the murder of a negro. Insanity was pleaded in his defense, and so plausibly that it is believed he would have escaped had his victim been a white man.

I quote on this point Mr. Benjamin H. Hill, who has been prosecuting attorney of the Atlanta, Ga., circuit for twelve years. He says: “In cities and towns the negro gets equal and exact justice before the courts. It is possible that, in remote counties, where the question is one of a fight between a white man and a negro, there may be a lingering prejudice that causes occasional injustice. The judge, however, may be relied on to correct this. As to negro jurors, I have never known a negro to allow his lawyer to accept a negro juror. For the State I have accepted a black juror fifty times, to have him rejected by the opposing lawyer by order of his negro client. This has incurred so invariably that I have accepted it as a rule. Irrespective of that, the negro gets justice in the courts, and the last remaining prejudice against him in the jury-box has passed away. I convicted a white man for voluntary manslaughter under peculiar circumstances. A negro met him on the street and cursed him. The white man ordered him off and started home. The negro followed him to his house and cursed him until he entered the door. When he came out, the negro was still waiting. He renewed the abuse, followed him to his store, and there struck him with his fist. In the struggle that followed, the negro was shot and killed. The jury promptly convicted the slayer.”

So much for the relation between the races in the South, in churches, schools, social organizations, on the railroad, 303and in theaters. Everything is placed on the basis of equal accommodations, but separate. In the courts the blacks are admitted to the jury-box as they lift themselves into the limit of qualification. Mistakes have been made and injustice has been worked here and there. This was to have been expected, and it has been less than might have been expected. But there can be no mistake about the progress the South is making in the equitable adjustment of the relations between the races. Ten years ago nothing was settled. There were frequent collisions and constant apprehensions. The whites were suspicious and the blacks were restless. So simple a thing as a negro taking an hour’s ride on the cars, or going to see a play, was fraught with possible danger. The larger affairs—school, church, and court—were held in abeyance. Now all this is changed. The era of doubt and mistrust is succeeded by the era of confidence and good-will. The races meet in the exchange of labor in perfect amity and understanding. Together they carry on the concerns of the day, knowing little or nothing of the fierce hostility that divides labor and capital in other sections. When they turn to social life they separate. Each race obeys its instinct and congregates about its own centers. At the theater they sit in opposite sections of the same gallery. On the trains they ride each in his own car. Each worships in his own church, and educates his children in his schools. Each has his place and fills it, and is satisfied. Each gets the same accommodation for the same money. There is no collision. There is no irritation or suspicion. Nowhere on earth is there kindlier feeling, closer sympathy, or less friction between two classes of society than between the whites and blacks of the South to-day. This is due to the fact that in the adjustment of their relations they have been practical and sensible. They have wisely recognized what was essential, and have not sought to change what was unchangeable. They have yielded neither to the fanatic nor demagogue, refusing to be misled by the one or misused by the other. While the world has been clamoring over their differences 304they have been quietly taking counsel with each other, in the field, the shop, the street and cabin, and settling things for themselves. That the result has not astonished the world in the speediness and the facility with which it has been reached, and the beneficence that has come with it, is due to the fact that the result has not been freely proclaimed. It has been a deplorable condition of our politics that the North has been misinformed as to the true condition of things in the South. Political greed and passion conjured pestilential mists to becloud what the lifting smoke of battle left clear. It has exaggerated where there was a grain of fact, and invented where there was none. It has sought to establish the most casual occurrences as the settled habit of the section, and has sprung endless jeremiades from one single disorder, as Jenkins filled the courts of Christendom with lamentations over his dissevered ear. These misrepresentations will pass away with the occasion that provoked them, and when the truth is known it will come with the force of a revelation to vindicate those who have bespoken for the South a fair trial, and to confound those who have borne false witness against her.

One thing further need be said, in perfect frankness. The South must be allowed to settle the social relations of the races according to her own views of what is right and best. There has never been a moment when she could have submitted to have the social status of her citizens fixed by an outside power. She accepted the emancipation and the enfranchisement of her slaves as the legitimate results of war that had been fought to a conclusion. These once accomplished, nothing more was possible. “Thus far and no farther,” she said to her neighbors, in no spirit of defiance, but with quiet determination. In her weakest moments, when her helpless people were hedged about by the unthinking bayonets of her conquerors, she gathered them for resistance at this point. Here she defended everything that a people should hold dear. There was little proclamation of her purpose. Barely did the whispered 305word that bespoke her resolution catch the listening ears of her sons; but for all this the victorious armies of the North, had they been rallied again from their homes, could not have enforced and maintained among this disarmed people the policy indicated in the Civil Rights bill. Had she found herself unable to defend her social integrity against the arms that were invincible on the fields where she staked the sovereignty of her States, her people would have abandoned their homes and betaken themselves into exile. Now, as then, the South is determined that, come what may, she must control the social relations of the two races whose lots are cast within her limits. It is right that she should have this control. The problem is hers, whether or not of her seeking, and her very existence depends on its proper solution. Her responsibility is greater, her knowledge of the case more thorough than that of others can be. The question touches her at every point; it presses on her from every side; it commands her constant attention. Every consideration of policy, of honor, of pride, of common sense impels her to the exactest justice and the fullest equity. She lacks the ignorance or misapprehension that might lead others into mistakes; all others lack the appalling alternative that, all else failing, would force her to use her knowledge wisely. For these reasons she has reserved to herself the right to settle the still unsettled element of the race problem, and this right she can never yield.

As a matter of course, this implies the clear and unmistakable domination of the white race in the South. The assertion of that is simply the assertion of the right of character, intelligence and property to rule. It is simply saying that the responsible and steadfast element in the community shall control, rather than the irresponsible and the migratory. It is the reassertion of the moral power that overthrew the scandalous reconstruction governments, even though, to the shame of the Republic be it said, they were supported by the bayonets of the General Government. Even the race issue is lost at this point. If the 306blacks of the South wore white skins, and were leagued together in the same ignorance and irresponsibility under any other distinctive mark than their color, they would progress not one step farther toward the control of affairs. Or if they were transported as they are to Ohio, and there placed in numerical majority of two to one, they would find the white minority there asserting and maintaining control, with less patience, perhaps, than many a Southern State has shown. Everywhere, with such temporary exceptions as afford demonstration of the rule, intelligence, character, and property will dominate in spite of numerical differences. These qualities are lodged with the white race in the South, and will assuredly remain there for many generations at least; so that the white race will continue to dominate the colored, even if the percentages of race increase deduced from the comparison of a lame census with a perfect one, and the omission of other considerations, should hold good and the present race majority be reversed.

Let no one imagine, from what is here said, that the South is careless of the opinion or regardless of the counsel of the outside world. On the contrary, while maintaining firmly a position she believes to be essential, she appreciates heartily the value of general sympathy and confidence. With an earnestness that is little less than pathetic she bespeaks the patience and the impartial judgment of all concerned. Surely her situation should command this rather than indifference or antagonism. In poverty and defeat,—with her cities destroyed, her fields desolated, her labor disorganized, her homes in ruins, her families scattered, and the ranks of her sons decimated,—in the face of universal prejudice, fanned by the storm of war into hostility and hatred—under the shadow of this sorrow and this disadvantage, she turned bravely to confront a problem that would have taxed to the utmost every resource of a rich and powerful and victorious people. Every inch of her progress has been beset with sore difficulties; and if the way is now clearing, it only reveals more clearly the 307tremendous import of the work to which her hands are given. It must be understood that she desires to silence no criticism, evade no issue, and lessen no responsibility. She recognizes that the negro is here to stay. She knows that her honor, her dear name, and her fame, no less than her prosperity, will be measured by the fulness of the justice she gives and guarantees to this kindly and dependent race. She knows that every mistake made and every error fallen into, no matter how innocently, endanger her peace and her reputation. In this full knowledge she accepts the issue without fear or evasion. She says, not boldly, but conscious of the honesty and the wisdom of her convictions: “Leave this problem to my working out. I will solve it in calmness and deliberation, without passion or prejudice, and with full regard for the unspeakable equities it holds. Judge me rigidly, but judge me by my works.” And with the South the matter may be left—must be left. There it can be left with the fullest confidence that the honor of the Republic will be maintained, the rights of humanity guarded, and the problem worked out in such exact justice as the finite mind can measure or finite agencies administer.

MY special amusement in New York is riding on the elevated railway. It is curious to note how little one can see on the crowded sidewalks of this city. It is simply a rush of the same people—hurrying this way or that on the same errands—doing the same shopping or eating at the same restaurants. It is a kaleidoscope with infinite combinations but the same effects. You see it to-day, and it is the same as yesterday. Occasionally in the multitude you hit upon a genre specimen, or an odd detail, such as a prim little dog that sits upright all day and holds in its mouth a cup for pennies for its blind master, or an old bookseller with a grand head and the deliberate motions of a scholar moldering in a stall—but the general effect is one of sameness and soon tires and bewilders.

Once on the elevated road, however, a new world is opened, full of the most interesting objects. The cars sweep by the upper stories of the houses, and, running never too swiftly to allow observation, disclose the secrets of a thousand homes, and bring to view people and things never dreamed of by the giddy, restless crowd that sends its impatient murmur from the streets below. In a course of several months’ pretty steady riding from Twenty-third Street, which is the station for the Fifth Avenue Hotel, to Rector, which overlooks Wall Street, I have made many acquaintances along the route—and on reaching the city my first curiosity is in their behalf.

One of these is a boy about six years of age—akin in his fragile body and his serious mien, a youngster that is very precious to one. I first saw this boy on a little balcony about three feet by four, projecting from the window of a poverty-stricken fourth floor. He was leaning over 309the railing, his white, thoughtful head just clearing the top, holding a short round stick in his hand. The little fellow made a pathetic picture, all alone there above the street, so friendless and desolate, and his pale face came between me and my business many a time that day. On going up town that evening just as night was falling, I saw him still at his place, white and patient and silent. Every day afterwards I saw him there, always with the short stick in his hand. Occasionally he would walk around the balcony rattling the stick in a solemn manner against the railing, or poke it across from one corner to another and sit on it. This was the only playing I ever saw him do, and the stick was the only plaything he had. But he was never without it. His little hand always held it, and I pictured him every morning when he awoke from his joyless sleep, picking up his plaything and going out to his balcony, as other boys go to play. Or perhaps he slept with it, as little ones do with dolls and whip-tops.

I could see that the room beyond the window was bare. I never saw any one in it. The heat must have been terrible, for it could have had no ventilation. Once I missed the boy from the balcony, but saw his white head, moving about slowly in the dusk of the room. Gradually the little fellow become a burden to me. I found myself continually thinking of him, and troubled with that remorse that thoughtless people feel even for suffering for which they are not in the slightest degree responsible. Not that I ever saw any suffering on his face. It was patient, thoughtful, serious, but with never a sign of petulance. What thoughts filled that young head—what contemplation took the place of what should have been the ineffable upbringing of childish emotion—what complaint or questioning were living behind that white face—no one could guess. In an older person the face would have betokened a resignation that found peace in the hope of things hereafter. In this child, without hope or estimation, it was sad beyond expression.

One day as I passed I nodded at him. He made no sign in return. I repeated the nod on another trip, waving 310my hand at him—but without avail. At length, in response to an unusually winning exhortation, his pale lips trembled into a smile—but a smile that was soberness itself. Wherever I went that day that smile went with me. Wherever I saw children playing in the parks, or trotting along with their hands nestled in strong fingers that guided and protected, I thought of that tiny watcher in the balcony—joyless, hopeless, friendless—a desolate mite, hanging between the blue sky and the gladsome streets—lifting his wistful face now to the peaceful heights of the one, and now looking with grave wonder on the ceaseless tumult of the other. At length—but why go any further? Why is it necessary to tell that the boy had no father, that his mother was bedridden from his birth, and that his sister pasted labels in a drug-house, and he was thus left to himself all day? It is sufficient to say that I went to Coney Island yesterday, and forgot the heat in the sharp saline breezes—watched the bathers and the children—listened to the crisp, lingering music of the waves as they sang to the beach—ate a robust lunch on the pier—wandered in and out among the booths, tents, and hubbub—and that through all these manifold pleasures, I had a companion that enjoyed them with a gravity that I can never hope to emulate, but with a soulfulness that was touching—and that as I came back in the boat, the breezes singing through the cordage, music floating from the fore-deck, and the sun lighting with its dying rays the shipping that covered the river, there was sitting in front of me a very pale but very happy bit of a boy, open-eyed with wonder, but sober and self-contained, clasping tightly in his little fingers a short battered stick. And finally that whenever I pass by a certain overhanging balcony now, I am sure of a smile from an intimate and esteemed friend who lives there.

New York City, Dec. 27, 1889.

In New York Tribune, December 23, 1889.

Graham, N.C.

Boston, Mass.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Jan. 18, 1890.

Jersey City Heights, N. J.

Seattle, January 14, 1890.

Dallas, Texas.

Vicksburg, January 14, 1890.

Atlanta, Ga.

THE overflowing hearts of a sorrowing people found expression in words yesterday.

Memorial services to the memory of the dead Grady were held in DeGive’s Opera House, and for three hours eulogies were pronounced on his name.

Loving lips and dewy eyes told the sorrow of a bereaved people gathered to pay the last public tribute to their departed friend.

The service began at 11 o’clock, and continued until 2.

At half-past ten the various escorts assembled at the Chamber of Commerce. There they formed and marched to the Opera House in a body. General Clement A. Evans, D.D., and Rev. Dr. J. W. Lee, D.D., headed the procession. Following them were the speakers of the occasion, pallbearers, honorary escort and members of the Chi Phi Fraternity, headed by Mayor John T. Glenn.

At the Opera House the delegations were ranged on the stage. They were Dr. J. B. Hawthorne, Dr. H. C. Morrison, Dr. N.C. Barnett, General Clement A. Evans, Judge W. R. Hammond, Judge W. T. Newman, Mayor John T. Glenn, Hon. John Temple Graves, Prof. H. C. White, of Athens; Hon. Patrick Walsh, of Augusta; Julius L. Brown, W. A. Hemphill, Dr. J. W. Lee, Charles S. Northen, Louis Gholstin, T. L. Meador, B. B. Crew, Donald Bain, Hon. N. J. Hammond, Captain J. W. English, Governor Gordon, John C. Calhoun, of New York; Judge Howard Van Epps, Patrick Calhoun, Albert H. Cox, W. R. Joyner, C. A. Collier, John Colvin, Porter King, Captain Everett, S. M. Inman, Professor Bass, Major Jno. A. Fitten, Captain R. I. Lowry, L. J. Hill, W. H. Thompson, J. A. Wright, H. 346C. White, W. P. Hill, Arnold Broyles, and other members of the Chi Phi; W. J. Garrett, W. W. Boyd, W. L. Calhoun, Hon. T. H. Mustin, of Madison; R. D. Spalding, M. C. Kiser, J. J. Griffin, J. R. Wyly, H. B. Tompkins, L. B. Nelson, Charles Keith, Judge George Hillyer, Gus Long, Dr. Crawford, J. G. Oglesby, J. J. Spalding, John J. Falvey, Clark Howell, Jr., F. M. O’Bryan, C. A. Fouche, of Rome, and others.

The Opera House, inside and out, was draped in sable and white, and on the stage, forming a fragrant background, was a mass of beautiful flowers and floral pieces. In the center of the group was the lovely offering of the dead man’s associates and employés, standing out from a setting of palms and roses. To the right of this central piece was the crown from the people of Boston, and to the left the tribute from the Virginia Society.

To the front and at each side of the stage was a life-size crayon portrait of Mr. Grady, heavily draped, and resting on a gilded easel. Round the base of the easel were flowers and plants of delicate foliage, perfuming the air with their fragrant breath, and seeming to send sweet messages to the loved face above.

The galleries and boxes were all hung in mourning.

General Clement A. Evans opened the service with prayer, full of words of sweetness and comfort, and of grateful thanks for the good already accomplished by the one that is gone, even in so short a sojourn on the earth. General Evans prayed calmly and simply, concluding with the invocation of God’s blessing to those left behind, and an inspiration to those who were to speak of the departed soul.

Mayor Glenn, who presided over the service, then arose and announced the order of exercises. He said he was too sick of heart to attempt to offer a tribute to the memory of his dead friend, and contented himself with a few simple words of preface.

Judge W. R. Hammond was introduced, and read the 347following tribute of the Chi Phi Fraternity, of which Mr. Grady was one of the charter members at the State University:

THE CHI PHI MEMORIAL.

The following memorial and resolutions were prepared by a committee appointed by a number of members of the Chi Phi Fraternity, who assembled in Atlanta upon the announcement of the death of Henry W. Grady, who was a member of that Fraternity, and were read by Judge W. R. Hammond:

It is sad beyond the power of expression to be compelled to-day, and from this time henceforth, to speak of Henry W. Grady as dead. But it is with the profoundest pleasure that we take occasion to give utterance to our appreciation of his virtues, and bear testimony to those high qualities in him that marked him in many respects, not only as one of the leading men of his State and section, but as one of the foremost men of his times.

It is peculiarly appropriate that his club-mates of the Chi Phi Fraternity should perpetuate his memory, because he was one of its charter members at the State University, and always gave to it a place of unusual warmth in his affections, ever manifesting, in his attachment to its principles and to its members, that freshness of enthusiastic ardor which so strikingly characterized him in his college days. How well do we remember him—those of us who were accustomed to be with him in those days—as, with buoyant tread and sparkling eye and merry smile, he went out and came in amongst us, ever bearing in his frank, generous, hearty manner, the cheeriest good will to all, and the unmistakable evidence of malice and ill-will toward none. Easily and quickly did he win the hearts of all his club and college-mates, and it was their delight to do him honor whenever occasion permitted.

As it was then among the boys, so it was afterwards among men. He wore his heart upon his sleeve, and gave it to all without reserve. In some this characteristic would have been weakness, but in him it was a chief element of strength because of the very fact that he possessed it in such a marked and striking degree. Even those who were his enemies were won to him when they came into his presence, and had their dislikes charmed away by the magnetism of his manner and his open and unreserved frankness.

Henry Grady had eminent characteristics which made him great, and it is proper and right that we should place upon record our estimate 348of them, and cannot but be highly beneficial to us to thoughtfully consider some of them.

His mind was exceedingly subtle, and his perceptible powers unusually and remarkably keen. He comprehended at a glance, and discriminated as if by intuition. It was this, doubtless, that gave him that wonderful expressiveness of speech which so completely captivated all who ever heard him. He saw clearly—therefore he had power to make others see.

We all have within us at times vague and inexpressible thoughts, and we feel a desire for some one who can interpret them for us, and give utterance and expression to that which we cannot even put into the form of a suggestion. We feel the need of a Daniel who can tell us the dream, and then give us the interpretation of it. Who that has listened to the magic of Grady’s speech, or gathered the subtle thought from his well-chosen words, has not found in them the expression of that which seemed to lie slumbering in his own bosom, only to be awakened by the touch of his master hand! Such is the service which genius renders to humanity, and such did he render for us with a power that was almost matchless and unapproachable.

But, superb as were his mental gifts, it was not this alone, or even chiefly, that made him great and gave him power such as few ever possessed to attract men to him. There have been those who equaled if they did not surpass him here, but who yet have failed to impress themselves upon humanity with a tithe of the force exerted by him. It was his great heart that endeared him to us all and made us love him and rejoice in his success, with a feeling that knew no jealousy, and ever prompted us to bid him God-speed in his onward and upward career to the high destiny which seemed to await him.

True love is unmistakable in its manifestations. He who really and truly loves his fellows need not fear that they will fail to find it out. It will manifest itself, not in the arts and wiles of the demagogue, but in a thousand ways which need not be premeditated, and cannot be misjudged or misunderstood.

Grady loved humanity, and love with him was not weak sentimentality, but strong, over-mastering passion. He loved humanity, not in the abstract, but in the person of those members of it who came within reach of him. And this love to them was not a mere sentiment, but a real passion, to which he gave expression in his never-tiring acts of devotion and his ceaseless efforts to aid them in every way and by every means that lay in his power. It was thus that he grappled his friends to him with hoops of steel and held them in a grasp which nothing could loosen.

It was Grady’s strong emotional nature that gave wings to his words and carried them so deep into the hearts of his fellow men. Thought 349must have feeling back of it before it can have power to stir men’s blood and move them to action. The twain must be married together as one, and from their union springs a light and power which are potent factors in the redemption of humanity. In Grady they were united, and hence his words burnt their way into the souls of men. The magnificence of his thoughts, and the untold wealth of feeling which sprang from his great heart, were not to be resisted, and easily won and held the admiration and homage of his fellow men.

But the deep pathos of Grady’s heart, so often stirred into those grand utterances which made him famous, seems now to have been but the prophecy of the far deeper pathos of his untimely death. Oh how sad it was to see him lying there upon his bier mute and motionless, when but yesterday the nation hung upon his words, and men of all sections and political parties delighted to do him honor. Oh how strong in our breasts is the wish that he might have lived, not only for himself, his family and friends, but also for the sake of his country, and especially his beloved Southland, just beginning to feel the disenthrallment from her bonds, and to realize that one had arisen who seemed to have the power to place her before the Nation and the world in her rightful position, and claim for her that sympathy and forbearance which she so much needs in the solution of the great problem which has been thrust upon her.

But he is gone, and we can only mourn his loss, and indulge the hope that the good he has done may live after him, and that even the sad bereavement of his death may do much to help seal the truth of his last public utterance upon the hearts of the people of this great country, and ultimately bring them together as one in a union of fraternal fellowship and love.

Resolved, That in the death of our brother, Henry W. Grady, our Fraternity has lost one of its most honored and devoted members.

Resolved, That we tender to his bereaved family our sincere and heartfelt sympathy.

Resolved, That a copy of this memorial and resolutions be sent to his family.

Resolved, That the city papers be requested to publish these proceedings, and that a copy be sent to the national organ of the Chi Phi Fraternity.

350Hon. Patrick Walsh was introduced by Mayor Glenn, and said:

ADDRESS OF HON. PATRICK WALSH.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Fellow-Citizens: We are here to pay a tribute to the worth and greatness of the departed—to him who did so much for the prosperity of the great and goodly city of Atlanta; to him who did so much for Georgia and the South, and to him who did so much for the restoration of peace and good will among the people of all sections of our common country.

The most gifted and useful public man of his day has passed away in the person of Henry W. Grady. I will refer briefly to him as an editor before he electrified the country, and won plaudits from his countrymen by the magic of his winsome eloquence.

I met him for the first time about twenty years ago at a meeting of the Georgia Press Association in the city of Augusta. Although he had not reached his majority, he was the proprietor and editor of the Rome Commercial, which was his first newspaper venture. He was then a striking and manly youth, and gave promise of a career of prominence and usefulness in the field of journalism. He moved from Rome to Atlanta and was engaged for a few years in editing the Herald, one of the brightest and most enterprising newspapers in the State. He acquired reputation as a correspondent during the period of reconstruction, and subsequently represented one of the leading journals of the North as its special representative in Florida during the memorable campaign of 1876, when the returning board of that State negatived the will of the people. Mr. Grady gave the country graphic and truthful pictures of the evils which the South endured. He strikingly depicted the wrongs imposed upon our people and exposed the usurpation of those placed in authority by the aid of the general Government. During that sad period of the South’s eventful history, he rendered signal service to the people, and the 351principles which he advocated, with a steadfast devotion and an exalted patriotism.

His reputation as a journalist is identified with the growth and prosperity of that great newspaper, in the upbuilding of which he took such a conspicuous part. The Constitution stands as a monument to his ability as an editor. His versatility as a writer was something phenomenal. There was no subject within the range of the press that he did not discuss with a grace and facility that were captivating and with a clearness and vigor that were convincing. His imagination glowed with luminous thoughts which were clothed in the diction of polished rhetoric. Without disparagement to the living or the dead, he won the first place in the ranks of Southern journalists.

I speak of Mr. Grady as an editor. Others will speak of him as an orator. Oratory was a natural gift with him. It was born in him. Where others struggle to win success, he, by reason of his genius, reached the mountain top, and from this great eminence spoke to the ear of the Nation and captured the hearts of the people. He achieved greatness by reason of his vigorous mentality, and his fame as an editor and as an orator is voiced by the sentiments of admiring but sorrowing friends in all sections of the Union. He has been stricken before his time. Already the first of his generation, if his life had been spared his opportunity for greatness would have broadened and given him in “the applause of listening senates” a field for the exercise of those great gifts with which he was so richly endowed. He died too soon for his people and for his country. But his name and his fame will be an example and an inspiration to practice and perpetuate the principles of government in the advocacy of which he yielded up his life.

“With charity for all and malice toward none,” he went about among his countrymen doing good. It was his mission to help the poor and to aid the deserving. Every good work received the support of his impulsive heart and noble soul. His last speech was an impassioned and eloquent 352plea for a peaceful solution of that great problem which the South and the South alone can solve. It was not to oppress, but to elevate the colored man—to enable both races to live in peace, and work out their mission in the regeneration of the South. What he so eloquently said in Boston represents the firm conviction of his Southern countrymen, and his death but emphasizes the truth and force of his position. The South is free and the intelligence and courage of her people will preserve her and her institutions for all time from hostile and inferior domination.

The South mourns the untimely death of Georgia’s brilliant son. The North deeply sympathizes with us in the death of him whose last public utterance so feelingly touched the patriotic heart of the people, and the response comes back from all sections of a re-united people and a restored Union. Few men have accomplished so much for the unification of public sentiment on questions of grave import, and there is no one who has accomplished more for the material development of his beloved South. He is dead, but his works will live after him. His name is enshrined in the hearts of his grateful countrymen, who are saddened and bowed down with unspeakable sorrow.

Henry W. Grady had the zeal of a martyr and valor of a patriot. If it be permitted to mortals who have put on immortality to look upon this world from their celestial home, the incense of praise which ascends from our stricken hearts will be grateful to the soul of Henry Grady. God has set his seal upon his silver tongue, and no more forever will his eloquent voice, stimulating his fellow-countrymen to deeds of noble enterprise, be heard on earth. Matchless the fertility of his mind, matchless the magic and power of his presentation, matchless his power of organization, matchless his power of accomplishment. Truly, indeed, can it be said of him, there is no man left to fill his place.

May his golden soul rest in the bosom of the God that gave it, is the humble but heartfelt prayer of one who 353admired and respected him living, and who mourns and reveres him dead.

ADDRESS OF HON. B. H. HILL.

I cannot speak in studied phrase of my dead friend. The few simple words I can trust my faltering lips to utter will come from a heart burdened with grief too deep for language to express. A grief whose crushing weight, outside of my own home circle, has taken away from life its brightest hopes and its highest inspiration.

In the summer of 1866 I first met Henry Grady, even then giving promise of marvelous gifts of mind and heart. From that summer evening, remembered now as though it were but yesterday, I have loved him with all a brother’s devotion and tenderness. During all these years there has been no shadow on our friendship and no secrets in our hearts. In prosperity he has rejoiced with me, and when sorrow and trouble came no voice was as cheering, no sympathy was as sweet as his. Only a year ago, when death came into my home and took the one little blossom that had bloomed in my heart as my own, he wrote to my mother words of tenderest comfort for her and of love for me—words that are inexpressibly precious to me now. Out of my life into the beautiful beyond have passed the two friends I loved best on earth—the chivalrous Gordon, the peerless Grady. God keep my friends and lead them gently through the meadow-lands where the river flows in song eternal. I know that near its crystal banks, where the birds sing sweetest and flowers bloom brightest, they have clasped hands in blessed and happy reunion. The love with which Henry Grady inspired his friends has never been surpassed by mortal man. Beautiful and touching have been the expressions of devotion that have come to his family. I believe that there are hundreds all over this State who would gladly take his place in yonder silent tomb, if by so doing they could restore him to the people who loved him and who need him so greatly. It is not his great genius, unrivaled as it was; not his fervent 354patriotism, unselfish as it was; not his wonderful eloquence, matchless as it was; not his public spirit, willing as it was—these are not the recollections that have moved the people as they have never been moved before.

But it was the great heart of the man beating in loving sympathy with suffering, touching with sweetest encouragement the lowly and struggling, carrying the sunshine of his own radiant life into so many unhappy lives, that now bow down the hearts of the people under the weight of a personal loss.

Henry Grady lived in an atmosphere of love. In him there was greatness—greatness unselfish—unconscious—gentle as the heart of a child. In him there was charity—charity white and still as the moonlight that shines into the shadows of night. In him there was heroism—the heroism of the knight that drew no sword, but waved in his hand, high above his white plumed brow, the sacred wand of peace, of love, of fraternity. In him there was patriotism, but a patriotism as pure and steadfast as a flame burning as a passion for the people he loved. As I contemplate this life through the years that I have known him so well, I feel as one who has seen the sun rise in the cloudless spring time, warming into beauty all the flowers of the earth, and winning into praise all the songsters of the air, at noonday, when all earth was rejoicing in its light and growing in its strength, suddenly fade away, leaving the land in darkness. Henry Grady was the great sun of the Southland, under whose fervid eloquence the cold heart of the North was melting into patience, confidence, justice, sympathy and love. It is no exaggeration to say that he was the great hope of the country.

The eyes of the South were looking toward him with hope. The ears of the North were listening to him with faith. Inscrutable, indeed, are the ways of a Providence that demanded a life so richly endowed, so potential for good. And yet it is the finite mind that would question either the mercy or wisdom of the Infinite. Our hero could not have died at a time when he was dearer to his people. 355His last brave, eloquent message will find its way, has found its way, to the hearts and consciences of his countrymen. His death is a sacrificial offering from whose altar rises even now the incense of perpetual peace and a perfect union of brotherly love. The lessons of his life will ripen with the passing years. Ages yet to come will compass the fullness of his fame and time will consecrate the patriotic martyrdom of his death. He sang like one inspired with the sacred memories of the past and the glorious hopes of the future. His works and his noble qualities will expand and multiply from his tomb as the sweet spice rushes from the broken alabaster vase. His name will become the synonym for friendship, charity, wisdom, eloquence, patriotism and love, wherever these virtues are known and treasured among men.

To use his own beautiful words, written of another: “Those who loved him best will find him always present. They will see him enthroned in every heart that kindles with sympathy to others. They will feel his kindly presence in the throb of every hand that clasps their hands in the universal kinship of grief. They will see his loving memory beaming from every eye as it falls on theirs.” So he shall live in Georgians and with Georgians forever and forever. On the monument which loving hands will erect to his memory let the inscription be written: “At all times and everywhere he gave his strength to the weak—his sympathy to the suffering—his life to his country and his heart to God.” Our hearts go out to-day in tenderest sympathy to the loved ones at home. Those alone who have had the privilege of entering the charmed circle can know the void left there.

To the mother who idolized this noble son—and he never forgot her, for did he not turn aside from questions of state to tell the Nation that her knees were the truest altar he had ever found, and her hands the fairest and strongest that had ever led him; to the sweet and loving sister, the companion of his boyhood; to the heart-broken wife always worthy of his love, devoted to him, ever dear to him; 356to the sweet and gentle daughter, the idol of his heart and household; to the noble and manly son—these were his jewels. And as we loved him so shall we love them. I have seen a picture with a shaft of light reaching from earth to heaven. Up the long, white rays, dazzling in glory and transcendent in beauty, an immortal soul is ascending to the illumined heights—ascending to meet its God. I think that if there ever was a soul borne upward upon rays of glory it was the beautiful soul of this friend we loved. The golden beams of this earthly glory shining into the pure light of heaven wove his radiant pathway to the stars. What an ascension for an immortal soul! Earth’s glory under his feet; Heaven’s glory upon his brow. So he, our immortal, becomes God’s immortal. Oh, thou bright, immortal spirit! Thou standeth this day in the presence of the angels. The King, in his beauty, hath greeted thee with the welcome: Well done, well done good and faithful servant; the great and good that have passed from earth are thy companions, and thy ears have heard music sweeter far than all earthly plaudits. Yet we miss thee; we mourn thee; through the rifted heavens we greet thee with grateful tears and undying love.

MR. JULIUS L. BROWN’S SPEECH.

Again we are assembled in the house of mourning. Our homes and public buildings are yet black with the symbols of our grief for him who went before.

“One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, so fast they follow.”

Two short weeks ago, while we were assembled in our capital covered with the insignia of grief, to do honor to the memory of one who had been our chief when the storm of war raged, we received a telegram, mingling his grief with ours, from him, then on his journey of duty to Boston, whose sad death we have met this day to mourn.

Jefferson Davis and Henry Grady are dead. To-day their souls commune, and we are left to weep. In their deaths the South has lost two of her noblest sons. One 357was gathered to his fathers full of years and rich in honor. He had served his country well. He had been the chosen leader of our people, when the storms of war were raging. He, as our representative, had been subjected to insults and to indignities by the Government he had honored, and in whose service he had spent the best years of his life. He passed away, and the sunset of his life was glorious and beautiful.

We have not yet put aside the sables of grief we wear for Jefferson Davis, and yet in two short weeks we have met to mourn the death of him whom we hold dearer; our townsman, our daily associate and friend.

Henry W. Grady has gone to his last home.

One was an old man, ready and waiting to be called. His day was over, his work was done, and he was waiting for his rest. His sun had risen, past its meridian in glory and was sinking in honor. For him the night in due time had come. The other, was a young man, full of hope and rich in promise. His sun had just arisen and it gave promise that before him was yet a glorious day.

One was the chosen representative of our people before the storms of war had swept over us. He was the representative of the South under its old system. The other was the acknowledged exponent of the South under its altered condition of affairs.

We weep for him to-day.

Of all the young men in America none had such power for good. None had the ear of the public so completely as he to be heard. None had so eloquent a tongue to produce conviction. None had so magnetic a bearing to induce followers. He was ambitious, yes, but for what? Not for the spoils of office, not for command of his fellow-man, not for himself, but for his people. Years ago when his friends all over Georgia urged him to allow his name to be presented for a post of honor in the counsels of the Nation he refused. His letter of declination was so strong, so patriotic, and so unselfish that it commanded the admiration of the world. I know that even far-off New Zealand 358published his words and did him honor. His eloquent speech in New York completed the structure of his national fame. From the night of its delivery the whole country ranked him among its foremost citizens. Even in down-trodden and oppressed Cuba his eloquent words were translated into the Spanish tongue and read with delight while I was there. The echoes of his last eloquent, matchless defense of the South yet linger in Faneuil Hall, and so long as its historic walls shall stand they will be classed with the best efforts of Everett and of Webster. His friends all over the country read his words, and wondered that he was so great. Ambitious; yes, ambitious to be able to present the cause of the South in such a manner as to produce conviction in the minds and in the hearts of its most ultra defamers, that our people now in good faith accept as final the construction placed upon the Constitution of this country by the victors, and that they are as absolutely loyal and devoted, as are the people of the North, to that Union against which his father had fought.

With no apologies for the past; with no recantation of the belief that they were patriots, without in any way casting reproach upon our dead, with a nature grand enough to admire Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, he had taken for his high mission on this earth, the task of reconciling the people of the sections. Until this great mission was accomplished, he had no time to devote to the narrow duties of a public office. Office, therefore, he did not seek. Office he would not have. There was but one office in this land great enough for him. Had he lived until his sun had reached its meridian splendor there would have been a complete reconciliation between the sections. Partisan malignity would not have sought to enact laws aimed at only a part of this grand country. Soon would there have been a complete union of hearts between those who had been engaged in fratricidal strife, which the most ultra partisanship could not have severed. Too young himself to be in the war, but the son of a gallant Confederate soldier, killed upon the field of battle, he, 359more than any one of older years, could by his chosen profession bear the messages of peace to the North, and by his mighty pen, by his eloquent tongue, by his melodious voice, and by his commanding presence could he procure a hearing from an audience of strangers and produce conviction. If it be true that,

then his last words, uttered in behalf of his people, will not have been spoken in vain.

In his death the South has lost its most eloquent advocate and its most powerful defender. America weeps for one of her noblest sons. Who is there to finish this work? God grant that there may rise some one to complete his mission!

He was a man full of impulse and a quick reader of the popular mind. Well do we all remember the time when the result of a presidential election became certainly known, how his heart, wild with joy at what he believed to be the beginning of better days for the South, organized a street procession and proceeded to the legislative halls of this State, and with his followers entered the house, and in his clear, ringing voice announced, “Mr. Speaker: A message from the American people,” and adjourned it. ’Tis said that history shows that there have been but two men who have ever adjourned a parliament without a vote, Oliver Cromwell and Henry Grady. One was an act of tyranny—the other the expression of the desire of every member of the house.

A citizen of Atlanta, he loved Georgia; a Georgian, he adored the South; a Southerner, he worshipped the whole Union. He was an American in the fullest sense of that term. There was no work of public or private charity among us which he did not aid by his tongue, his pen, his head or his purse, whether that work was to procure the pardon of an abandoned young girl confined in the chain-gang with criminals, or canvassing the streets of Atlanta 360through snow and ice, accompanied with a retinue of wagons and drays, to accumulate fuel and provisions to prevent our poor from freezing and from starving. It was in response to his appeals, more than to all else combined, that a home is now being erected within sight of the dome of yonder capitol for the aged and infirm veterans of the Lost Cause. It was to him more than to all others that our Piedmont Expositions, designed to show to the world the wealth of our undeveloped mineral, agricultural and other resources, were carried to a successful end. It was through his persuasive power that the Chautauqua Association, designed to more thoroughly educate our people, was established.

But in the limited time allotted to me, I cannot go into further details. If you seek his monuments, look around. They are in every home and every calling of life. In all that which has tended to develop the material resources of the country, to enrich his people, to encourage education and a love of the arts, to relieve suffering, to provide for the poor, and to make our people better and nobler, he devoted his life, unselfishly and without hope of other reward than the approval of his conscience.

He was a model citizen. As a member of society, he was welcomed to every fireside. He was the center of every group. His doors were open always to strangers. He was given to hospitality. He was the life, the soul of every enterprise with which he was connected. As a patriot, his heart was bowed down with grief that his countrymen should be estranged. As a humanitarian, his great heart wept at the suffering of the poor, and his voice was ever raised in behalf of the afflicted and oppressed. As a friend, he was devoted, unselfish and loyal. Now, that he is gone, we know how dear he was to us. We have awakened to the full appreciation of his great worth, and of the calamity which has befallen us.

Yesterday we stood by his tomb. No private citizen in this country ever had such a pageant. For miles the streets were lined with people. We saw the aged and the 361young, the rich and the poor, the white and the black, with eyes dimmed by tears, with hearts bowed down with sorrow at loss of him. They had left their homes upon our greatest festal day to pay him the homage of their tears. To each of them his loss was a personal sorrow.

I knew Henry W. Grady well, and I loved him. To me his death is a personal grief. He had been my friend for more than twenty-three years. Well do I remember the day I joined his class in our University. Well do I picture his friendly presence as he bade me welcome and invited me to his home. Well do I recall our meeting in our college societies. Our plans, our struggles, our defeats and our triumphs there. Since that time, I have sat with him around social boards. He has been time and again an honored and a welcomed guest in my house. I shall miss him there. We have been together in public enterprises, we have met in the busy marts of men. We have worked side by side, and we have differed upon questions of policy, but in all these differences he has been my friend. I loved him, and deplore his death.

We shall erect in this city a monument to commemorate his many virtues, and to hold him up as an example before the young and those who come after us; but however exalted that monument may be, and however near the skys it may reach, the greatest and best monument to us who knew him will be the memory of his many virtues which we shall always treasure in our hearts.

Judge Emory Speer was on the list of speakers to follow Mr. Brown, but did not reach the city in time to take part in the exercises.

Twenty-three years ago, poor and painfully uncertain of even a broken part of education, but shortly from farm and camp and captivity, broken-hearted and distrusting all things, lonesome in a strange place, two companions met me at Athens and made me feel at home. One of them mourns to-day with me the death of the other.

I look across the many years as across a wide and misty river made up of many streams, and recall the sunny face, the glowing eye, the engaging smile, the warm hand formed; it seemed to assure a friend of love with its very clasp—the happy-hearted, the happy-making Henry Grady.

Treasured by his companions are traditions that his generous hands were helpful even then. It is known that his appeal to the “Great Old Commoner” kept a child of the State to the breast of its own Alma Mater. It is known that he led the relief corps of kindness to the aid of maimed veterans shivering in bitter winter at the old rock college. To suggest such deeds seemed natural to his heart, and to do them nobly seemed inherent to his hand.

His was the versatile genius of our class. Never fenced in to his text-books, apparently careless of mere curriculum, he roamed the fields of literature more than he tramped the turnpike of studies. Sparkling and popular, genial and beloved, his mind moved like a stream of poetry, cascading and flashing, banked in sweet flowers, and singing to sweet meadows made happy by its song.

His address as final orator of his society, fairly represents the mind of the man when launched. It was an exquisite fiction of ideal life. He painted in words an island of beauty; in the sweetness of his sentences the fragrance of flowers sweeter than nature’s own seemed to be wafted to rapt listeners; the loveliness of his creation stood out so vividly to the eye of intellect that no one view of any grace in statuary or beauty in picture of any artist would be remembered better. It was an island worthy to lay in the same sea with Tennyson’s Island of Avilion, where 363Knight and King Arthur was to rest his soul, and I would wish the soul of my class-mate the sweet and eternal rest of his own happy island, embowered in the beauties of his own sweet fancies forever, did I not believe that he has touched the pearl-strewn shore of a better and lovelier land than even this, or even that of which he dreamed; that he “rests in the balm-breathing gardens of God!”

Who would dream that such ideality of mind would be composed with such powers of business as he had? It is wonderful that the versatile course of his life, while adding to his breadth, did not lessen his depth. To but few, indeed, is it endowed to be both versatile and profound. His varied experience, like tributes, added to the brightness and to the breadth, and to the depth of his intellect, until before touching the sea it rolled in majestic splendor, wide and clear as the Potomac, deep and burden-bearing as the Ohio. He had great opportunities. He worked and won them. Starting without them, he created them by deserving them. That great journal, through whose columns he and his associates have done so much to rebuild the fortunes and hopes of our people, did not make Henry Grady. The Lord made him. But his bereaved associates there did all that men can do in the moulding of other men. They recognized him for what he was and for what he could become. They participated in the glorious work, They surrendered him, and he surrendered himself to his country. The first duty of the Southern patriot—a national duty also—was to recuperate this section. In that duty, no man out of office, perhaps no man at all, has labored with more credit and with better result than Henry W. Grady. For the complete reconciliation of the sections of this Union every patriot ought to strive and every Christian ought to pray. Sectional jealousies and angers are the only enemies of the Union, and those who claim to place the preservation of the Union above all other duties, ought to be the foremost forwarders of the fraternity of the American people. They who love the Union should help to heal its wounds.

364Strange spectacle! Noble culmination of a noble life! From the midst of those charged with hate toward the Union, Henry W. Grady went forth a minister to plead for love to all its parts.

“Blessed is the peacemaker.”

His voice was for that peace in our country made perpetual by justice to all and respect for the sacred things of earth. His voice was for building an American temple of peace, not upon the quicksands of comparative power, subject to the shift from one section to the other, but upon the everlasting foundations of right to all, respect to all, liberties and liberality to all!

Oh, what a cause he had! If successful, unfolded glories of the Union of future times; the sweet and swelling harmonies of the ever-increasing choir of free and happy States; the grand ideals of the venerable fathers all realized, and every bloom of American hope fruited in happiness, in love, in liberty, in enduring peace!

And if unsuccessful! If he and those to come must plead in vain for the unity as well as union of the country, then the dread doubt whether all peace is to be only preparation for deadly grapplings; the dread doubt whether, as in England and Scotland, these feuds are to harry our homes and our hearts for hundreds of years!

What a cause! and, thank God, what an advocate! It would seem that our own Southern sun had warmed and sweetened him for the work. He exactly fitted the culmination and mission of his life. His noble soul propelled his thoughts. His eloquence rushed from mountain-side fountains, pure and bold and free. His reasoning was so blended with appeal that the one took the shape of stating truths in sequence, and his appeal seemed responsive to the heart-beats of his listeners.

Thus the cause, the advocate and the occasion met, and once more in New England a Southern man was applauded as an American patriot. With the triple levers of his great soul and mind and tongue he moved two mighty sections, with all their weights of passions of victory and passions 365of defeat, with all their weights of misconceptions and misjudgments. With his hands he moved these mighty bodies nearer each to the heart of the other—nearer to that true Union for which the real heart of this country, in every part of it, beats with the pulses of a devoted love, never entirely to be stilled.

Oh, how nobly he must have been inspired as he felt the “rock-ribbed and iron-bound” prejudice of New England quiver to the touch of his magic hand; and as her snow began to melt under the warmth of his great heart, surely he was the sunshine of this great land!

But, oh, the grief of it—the bitter, bitter grief of it! Just as we knew how noble and great he was, he sank below the horizon of life, never to rise again!

I shall always recall him as dying like that lad from Lombardy, pictured by Browning. I shall think that the South, decked like a queen in all her jewels of glory and of love, came to his dying couch and said:

ADDRESS OF WALTER B. HILL, OF MACON, GA.

Love was the law of Henry Grady’s life. His splendid eminence among his fellows teaches once again that “he who follows love’s behest far exceedeth all the rest.” Its strongest throbs beat in the inner circle of the home; but in widening waves they expand first into friendship, then into public spirit, then into patriotism, then into philanthropy. When it rises above these forms of human affection in the incense of worship—we give it once more the sacred name of love, which it bore at its fireside shrine. From Henry Grady’s heart, that first and best and truest and most of all was the home-fond heart, there flowed out in all the prodigality of his generous soul, and yet with the perfect adjustment of due degree, all those currents of feeling which bear so many names and yet are one. And as 366he loved, so is he mourned—from the hearth of a desolated home to the borders of a mighty nation.

What was he to his friends? I dare not answer except to muffle my own heart in borrowed words—the words of Carlyle over the bier of the gifted Edward Irving—“His was the bravest, freest, brotherliest human soul mine ever came in contact with.”

What was he to Atlanta? More than any other man, he built this city which he rightly loved as he loved no other. Although the feudal independence of the old Southern life was distinctly promotive of individualism—yet it was reserved for this young leader—but one remove from that past generation, to give to our common country the finest and most conspicuous type which American citizenship has yet produced of that high civil virtue—public spirit. It is a virtue untaught in the schools—a grace and a duty not preached from the pulpit: and yet, as I study its manifestations in this marvelous man whose suggestion and sagacity planted the cornucopias of plenty amid industrial desolation and agricultural poverty—to me it seems far more in touch with the brotherhood of man and the helpfulness of Christ than the benevolence which so often degrades the recipient and the zeal which burns so fiercely for the conversion of opinions. If the Church does not claim it as the fruit of religion, the State may be proud to own it as the patriotism of peace.

What was he to Georgia? We naturally think of the material progress which he inspired throughout the State, and all due emphasis has been accorded to it. But we must not forget the other forms of progress to which he was devoted. What a many-sided man he was! He spent himself to the utmost of his wonderful resources in behalf of the intellectual culture of the State—in the earnest but sweet-spirited championship of that moral issue which he declared was “the most hopeful experiment ever undertaken in any American city,” in that magnificent tribute to the value of her young men, which Atlanta has “writ large” in the stately Association Building. And thus he, 367whose pen seemed like the touch of Midas turning to the gold of material wealth every interest to which it pointed, he teaches also that imperative lesson of our needy time—that to know and to be are greater things than to get and to have.

What was he to the South? Let the laureate answer:

More than any other public man, he was the voice of his people. His eloquence in magnetic speech, and that new art his genius had created—the oratory of the editorial!—along with the voices in literature of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page and Harry Stillwell Edwards, have conquered a hearing at the North. In glowing utterance and moving story, they have set forth the true and tender pictures of the old Southern life, the sincere and single-hearted heroism of the Confederate soldier, the cordial but self-respecting loyalty of the South of to-day to the restored Union. They have brought it to pass that in the contemporary fiction of English-speaking peoples the favorite scene is amid the old plantations, and the popular hero is the boy that wore the gray. By these subtle forces of genius, results have been achieved which no forensic advocacy or party zeal could ever have accomplished. Old verdicts of condemnation and prejudice have been reversed; and in their stead, comprehension has come, patience is coming, confidence will come.

For the sole but sufficient reason that the whole truth demands it, I ought to say, that from what seemed to me some of the implications of his public utterances I had urged upon him my own dissent; and his letter in reply, permitting me to differ without a discount in his sincere esteem, is now, more than ever, one of the treasures of my life.

His work for his people could not have been so adequately done had office crowned his worth. His advocacy would then have seemed professional and political. Public 368station would have put limitations on him—would have narrowed his audience. A rare lesson of his life is here—a lesson needed especially among us whose habit has been to associate official distinction too exclusively with public service. The people are greater than Senate or Congress. The official in Washington can speak only to his party. But the audiences which Grady and his generous eulogist, Depew, commands show that a man uncrowned with public office can be great in public life, and perhaps thereby do a greater work.

What was he to the Nation? Compelled by the limitations of the hour to answer in one word, I choose this: He it was who first taught the rising generation of the South to bind the name of Lincoln with that of Washington “as a sign upon their hand and a frontlet on their brow.”

We stand face to face with a great mystery. It is the tragedy of early death, like that of Arthur Henry Hallam, which wrung from the sweetest singer of our time the noblest poem of sorrow, a poem whose pages have been for three days past luminous to me with new and richer meaning. Accepting the evidence of consciousness in its report of the hopes and aspirations of the human soul, there can be but two rational hypotheses for this mystery of an unfinished life. One has been phrased by Renan in words like this: “There is at the heart of the universe, an infinite fiend who has filled the hearts of his creatures with delusions, in order that in awful mockery he may witness the discomfiture of their despair.” The other theory has been phrased by Martineau in words like these: “The universe, which includes and folds us round, is the life-dwelling of an eternal mind and an infinite love; and every aspiration is but a prophecy of the reality in that overarching scene where one incompleteness is rounded out in the greatness of God.” I need not tell you which of these faiths Henry Grady accepted, or I accept. I envy not the man who can think that there are in this universe any shadows dark enough to quench his sunny spirit. I 369believe (turning to his picture, on the stage) oh friend of mine! that I shall look again into that love-lit eye—that I shall clasp once more thy generous hand!

A poet sings of the echoes of the bugle from cliff and scar as contrasted with the impact of human influence:

In all gratitude we can say that we are happier because he lived; in all humility that we are better because his life touched ours. And because this is true our children and our fellow men shall be made happier and better; and so the echoes of his soul, reduplicated in ten thousand hearts, shall abide, a gladdening and beneficent force—

SPEECH OF JUDGE HOWARD VAN EPPS.

Ladies and Gentlemen: The lightning brought this message to Atlanta:

“Henry Grady spends Christmas in heaven.”

Who doubts it? What creature whom the Creator has loved enough to suffer him to hold a Christian’s faith will question that he is at this moment in company with the good and great and virtuous who have preceded him? I looked upon his face, the pitifulness of death sealed upon it, and as I turned away with swimming eyes, I saw hidden in a mass of flowers that loving hands had placed by his side, these words:

And the fragrant breath around him seemed vocal with triumphant voices, singing, “Reward without stint!” In 370Athens, the home of his boyhood, a few months ago, he said, “I am going to Sunday-school. I want to feel that I am a boy again.” When seated there the children sang, “Shall we gather at the river?” and he sank his face in both his hands, and tears flooded through his fingers. O, “Great Heart,” we know that when your eyes closed upon the weariness of the terrestrial, they opened fearless upon the glories of the celestial. I fancy Mr. Hill sought him without delay, fixing upon him the earnest, penetrating glance we know so well, but out of which the pained seriousness has been washed away forever, exclaiming, “Why, Henry! You? And so soon! Welcome home to our Father’s house!” Judge Lochrane has doubtless already repaired to his side and regaled him with a bit of celestial humor that set the seraphs ashout with laughter. Perhaps he has encountered by this time Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis with arms interlocked, their differences all adjusted, in wider wisdom, and has been startled to hear them say: “We were but just now speaking of you and of the future destiny of the American Republic. Mr. Lincoln had just remarked that the United States were on the threshold of a more cordial understanding and a closer union than ever before, and Mr. Davis has just quoted your prophetic invocation: ‘Let us resolve to crown the miracles of the past with the spectacle of a Republic compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love—loving from the Lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill—serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory—blazing out the path, and making clear the way, up which all the nations of the earth must come in God’s appointed time!’”

Oh, that he who alone knew how to describe “a perfect Christmas day,” could come back to his beloved Atlanta and make it all clear to us—the recognitions, the employments, the conversations, the blessedness of the redeemed. What sort of goblet of immortal nectar—of commingled “musk of yellow grain, of flavor of ripening fruits, fragrance of strawberries, exquisite odor of violets, aroma of 371all seasons” of the celestial year, did the angels brew out of the material of yesterday to pledge the never-ending fellowships of Heaven in? What sort of hug of odorous shine did Henry get armsful of yesterday, when he flung his hands wide apart in the presence of that Being whom he was wont to call always in his reverent speech “the Lord God Almighty.”

Oh, well enough for Henry! but for us only the pain of it all, the bitter pain. I look abroad and Atlanta’s business men seem grown suddenly older. The cry of the newsboys—“Paper, sir?”—is almost a sob. I went late at night into the Constitution building and the editors’ faces were graver than they should be, and the composing-room was heavy with suggestions of widowhood and orphanage.

I went into a store Christmas eve (for Henry would not have the children neglected) and the merchant couldn’t find anything he sought for, and said, apologetically, “I haven’t had any sense to-day.” The pity of it! We are bereft. Our city is desolate. We had some great public enterprises in view, that is, Henry had, and we were going to follow him, and overwork him, as usual.

We are disheartened—almost discouraged. Atlanta is so young and fiery, almost fierce in her civic energy, and pulls so hard on the reins. Who will drive for us now?

We will see more clearly after a little, when our grief is calmer, but now as we see it through our tears, the face and body of the times are out of joint.

I do not care, in this place and under present limitations, to speak of his kittenish boyhood; of his idyllic home-life; of his rollicsome and irresistible humor; of his sympathy and prodigality of self-sacrifice; of his boundless love to his fellow men; of his ability as a writer and super-eminence as an orator; of his pride in Atlanta and services in aid of her material progress; of his patriotic devotion to the South and to the Union. I want to ask indulgence to say one thing, which, as I believe, were he here to prescribe my course and dictate my utterances, he would have me say. I want to say to noble men of all parties, north and 372east and west, speaking here from Grady’s bier, that the South is no more hostile to the Union than is New England, and that her love, and sympathy, and desire to help the dependent class in her midst is deeper, if possible, than the treason of political agitators who seek to foment race prejudice to secure party supremacy. “We pledge our lives, our property, and our sacred honor,” that we will bring wisdom and humanity to the solution of the grave problem in government which confronts us, and that we “will carry in honor and peace to the end.” We repeat again and again, in our sadness, with the sacredness of our grief for his loss around us, the plea of Georgia’s son, for patience, for confidence, for sympathy, for loyalty to the Republic, devoid of suspicion and estrangement, against any section.

We send greeting to generous New England. They loved him and we love them for it. We have even forgiven them for being Republicans. We throw his knightly and Christian gauntlet at their feet. We challenge her business men, in the name of our champion of the doctrine of the brotherhood of men and of Americans, to the national glory-fields of the future—to fraternal love that will forgive errors of judgment seven times, and seventy times seven; and to a patriotic pride in and devotion to every foot of the soil of our magnificent Republic, that will brook no suspicions and no wrath in all her borders except when directed against a foreign enemy.

Professor White’s address was delivered under very trying conditions. He had been suffering from a severe headache all morning and, in fact, he has been unwell for several days past. During his speech he suffered painfully, and immediately at its conclusion he was so much overcome as to be almost completely prostrated. He was led from the stage to the office of Judge Will Haight, where he remained until he recovered, leaving for home later in the afternoon.

The address was delivered with pathos and emotion, 373and that part which bore on his close relations with the dead man touched a responsive chord in every heart in the vast audience that sat in listening attention to the words of love.

REMARKS OF PROF. H. C. WHITE.

My friends—companions in a common grief: My heart is yet too full of sorrow’s bitterness to frame in fitting terms the tribute I would wish to pay the gracious memory of our beloved dead. Save she who bears my name, he whom we buried yesterday was my dearest friend on earth. Our friendship, born of close companionship amid academic groves where we together caught the inspirations that come to wakening intellects, and nursed the high resolves that budding youth projects as guides along the future pathway of the man, was nourished as we grew to man’s estate, and in these latter years so closely knit by constant intercourse, reciprocal respect each for the other’s judgment, wishes and desires, and mutual confidences of hopes and fears, of sacred interests and fond ambitions, that when he died a great and fervent glow seemed gone from out of my life, and desolation laid its icy touch upon my heart.

In recognition of these sacred ties that closely bound our lives, I am bidden here to-day to join my grief to yours and say a word of him who was as dear to me as man may be to man.

How can I speak at Henry Grady’s funeral! What may I say that others have not said; that will not, in our history, be written; for a Nation mourns him and a continent deplores his untimely taking off, as the passing of the brightest hope that cheered the future of our common country’s rehabilitated life.

That he was worthy all the homage cultured men may pay to genius, talent, intellect, and wit, his works and reputation that survive beyond the grave will abundantly attest. That he was worthy all the plaudits honest men accord to truth and justness, integrity and honor, none dare stand here and interpose the faintest shadow of a 374doubt. That he was worthy all the sacred tears that gentle women and blessed little children may not refrain from showering on his grave as tribute to his tenderness, his gentleness, his abounding love for all things human, we, who knew him best, who shared the golden flood of sunshine his personality evoked and the sweetest, softest harmonies of the music of his life, we come, a cloud of witnesses, to testify.

He was truly great if earthly greatness may be measured by the lofty aspirations men conceive for bettering their fellow men’s estate, or by the success with which they realize ideals. His ambition was of the sort that makes men kings—not petty officers—and led him to aim to teach a mighty Nation how best its glorious destiny might be achieved. His ample view looked far beyond the narrow policies of strife and selfishness and partisan contentions that mark the statesmanship of lesser men, and counseled the broader, more effective lines of peace and love, of patience and forbearance. Had he but lived who may doubt but that his counsels would have prevailed? This city, which he loved so well and which he builded, stands, in its fair proportions, the peer of any on the earth in good and equitable government, the prosperous home of happy, cultured freemen, as a type of what he wished his neighbors and his fellow-countrymen might strive to make themselves in contrast with their fellow men; worthy to stand among the bravest and the best. Its massive walls stand witness to his energy, his skill and his success.

He was wise, and thousands came to him for counsel. The University—his loved and loving Alma Mater—whose smiles had brightened the endeavors of his youth, called him to her councils in his maturer years, and to-day she sits upon her classic hills, a Niobe, in tears and clad in mourning for him—chiefest among her brilliant sons; foremost among her guardians and advisers.

He was good; and for all the thousand chords of human emotions he played upon with facile pen and tongue of matchless eloquence, he ever held a heart in tender sympathy 375with childhood’s innocence, the mother’s love, the lover’s passion, the maiden’s modesty, the sinner’s penitence and the Christian’s faith.

One consolation comes to us, his sorrowing friends to-day. Around his bier no fierce contentions wage unseemly strife for offices left vacant by his death. He held no place that may be filled by gift of man. He filled no office within the power of governments or peoples to bestow. He served the public but was no public servant. He was a private citizen and occupied a unique position in the commonwealth, exalted beyond the meed of patronage, won by virtue of his individual qualities and held at pleasure of his genius and by the grace of God.

Full well I know that, in God’s providence, no one man’s death may halt the march of time to ultimate events or change the increasing purpose that through the ages runs, but this I do believe, that this man’s death has slowed the dial of our country’s progress to full fruition of its happiness, prosperity, and peace. To those of us who stand in history midway between a national life our fathers founded and wrecked in throes of revolution and of war, and another in the future, bright with fair promises but ill-defined as yet in form, with darkling clouds casting grim shadows across the lines along which it must be achieved, he was our chosen leader and our trusted champion. No one of us will be tardy in acknowledgment that he stood head and shoulders above us all and towered at the very front. That time will bring a successor in the leadership we reverently pray and confidently hope, but meanwhile our generation is camped in bivouac by the path of history awaiting the birth and training of another chief.

Of all his usefulness to nation, state and town; of all that he contributed to the glory of our country’s history—the brave defense of its unsullied past; the wise direction of its present purposes; the high ideals of its future progress—of these, others with equal knowledge, may speak with greater eloquence than I. I come especially to pay a simple tribute (time and occasion serve for nothing more) 376to the man himself—my boyhood’s, manhood’s companion, friend and lover. When on the day he died I nursed my selfish grief within the sacred precincts of a home which he had often beautified and rendered joyous by his presence; in the city of his birth, among the lanes his boyish feet had trod; amid scenes where his genius had first been plumed to flight; where he had felt the first touch of manhood’s aspirations and ambitions; where he had pressed his maiden suit of sacred love; where his dead hero-father lay at rest, and where the monumental shaft is reared to the base of which it was his ardent hope that he might bring his son to anoint him with the glories and the graces of a hero race—I thought no other’s sorrow could be as keen as mine. But lo! my neighbors shared an universal grief and draped their homes with sable tokens of their mourning hearts; the very children in the streets stopped in their Christmas play and spoke in whispers as in the presence of a dread calamity; and here, I find myself but one among a multitude to whom that great and noble heart had given of its gracious bounty and drawn them to himself by bonds of everlasting love that caused their tears to flow as freely as my own, in tribute to the sweetness, gentleness, magnetic joyousness of him that we have lost.

He was the very embodiment of love. A loving man; a man most lovable. Affection for his fellows welled from out his heart and overwhelmed in copious flood all brought within its touch. His love inspired counter-love in men of all degree. The aged marked his coming with a brightening smile; the young fell down and worshiped him. Unselfishness, the chiefest virtue men may claim—it carries all the others in its train—was possessed by him in unsurpassed degree. His generosity passed quick and far beyond the lines marked out by charity and overflowed the limits fixed by prudence. In fine, the gentler graces all were his:

377Science and religion alike declare that force is indestructible. Some catch from one and some the other the inspiration that gives them faith and blessed hope that that great thing we call the Soul may live and work beyond that accident which we call Death, which comes with all the terrors of unfathomable mystery to free the fretting spirit from its carnal chains.

He had no special knowledge—nor cared for none—of scientific theory or philosophic speculation, but he had gained from deep religious thought—not technical theology perhaps, but true religion, the same that taught him to “visit the widows and fatherless in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world”—he had gained from this a deep, abiding conviction in a life beyond the grave. That this was true I know; for often we have talked of these great mysteries and, closeted together, have weighed the doubts the increasing knowledge of the centuries has brought, and I have never known a man whose convictions were as firm, and who, frankly and squarely meeting every doubt, retained unshaken faith with all his heart, soul and mind.

How far this faith held him in loyalty to churchly creed—the necessary corollary of such faith as his—others are more competent than I to tell.

Great Spirit—that which was loose but yesterday from mortal tenement we sadly laid to rest—thy sorrowing friends send after thee, along the shimmering lines that guide thy flight from earth to glory, this fervent prayer—tempering our agony and comforting our desolation—that God, in His infinite wisdom, may count thy faith deserving such reward in Heaven as we would measure to thy works on earth.

God rest thee, princely gentlemen! God keep thee, peerless friend!

378When Mr. Graves was introduced, the audience broke into applause. His fame as an orator, and his intimate friendship with Mr. Grady were known, and his eloquent tribute to his dead friend moved the hearts of his hearers as they had seldom by words been moved before. Upon being introduced by Mayor Glenn, Mr. Graves said:

SPEECH OF HON. JOHN TEMPLE GRAVES.

I am one among the thousands who loved him, and I stand with the millions who lament his death.

I loved him in the promise of his glowing youth, when, across my boyish vision he walked with winning grace, from easy effort to success. I loved him in the flush of splendid manhood when a Nation hung upon his words—and now, with the dross of human friendship smitten in my soul—I love him best of all as he lies yonder under the December skies, with face as tranquil and with smile as sweet as patrial ever wore.

In this sweet and solemn hour all the rare and kindly adjectives that blossomed in the shining pathway of his pen, seem to have come from every quarter of the continent to lay themselves in loving tribute at their master’s feet; but rich as the music that they bring, all the cadences of our eulogy

And here to-day, within this hall glorified by the echoes of his eloquence, standing to answer the impulse of my heart in the roll-call of his friends, and stricken with my emptiness of words, I know that, when the finger of God touched his eyelids into sleep, there gathered a silence upon the only lips that could weave the sunbright story of his days, or mete sufficient eulogy to the incomparable richness of his life.

I agree with Patrick Collins that he was the most brilliant son of this Republic. If the annals of these times are 379told with truth, they will give him place as the phenomenon of his period, the Admirable Crichton of the age in which he lived. No eloquence has equaled his since Sargent Prentiss faded from the earth. No pen has plowed such noble furrow in his country’s fallow fields since the wrist of Horace Greeley rested; no age of the Republic has witnessed such marvelous conjunction of a magical pen with the velvet splendor of a mellow tongue, and although the warlike rival of these wondrous forces never rose within his life, it is writ of all his living, that the noble fires of his genius were lighted in his boyhood from the gleam that died upon his father’s sword.

I have loved to follow, and I love to follow now the pathway of that diamond pen as it flashed like an inspiration over every phase of life in Georgia. It touched the sick body of a desolate and despairing agriculture with the impulse of a better method, and the farmer, catching the glow of promise in his words, left off sighing and went to singing in his fields, until at last the better day has come, and as the sunshine melts into his harvests with the tender rain, the heart of humanity is glad in his hope and the glow on his fields seems the smile of the Lord. Its brave point went with cheerful prophecy and engaging manliness into the ranks of toil, until the workman at his anvil felt the dignity of labor pulse the somber routine of the hours, and the curse of Adam softening in the faith of silver sentences, became the blessing and the comfort of his days. Into the era of practical politics it dashed with the grace of an earlier chivalry, and in an age of pushing and unseemly scramble, it woke the spirit of a loftier sentiment, while around the glow of splendid narrative and the charm of entrancing plea there grew a goodlier company of youth, linked to the Republic’s nobler legends and holding fast that generous loyalty which builds the highest bulwark of the State.

First of all the instruments which fitted his genius to expression was this radiant pen. Long after it had blazed his way to eminence and usefulness, he waked the power 380of that surpassing oratory which has bettered all the sentiment of his country and enriched the ripe vocabulary of the world. Nothing in the history of human speech will equal the stately steppings of his eloquence into glory. In a single night he caught the heart of the country into its warm embrace, and leaped from a banquet revelry into national fame. It is, at last, the crowning evidence of his genius, that he held to the end, unbroken, the high fame so easily won, and sweeping from triumph unto triumph, with not one leaf of his laurels withered by time or staled by circumstance, died on yesterday—the foremost orator of all the world.

It is marvelous, past all telling how he caught the heart of the country in the fervid glow of his own! All the forces of our statesmanship have not prevailed for union like the ringing speeches of this bright, magnetic man. His eloquence was the electric current over which the positive and negative poles of American sentiment were rushing to a warm embrace. It was the transparent medium through which the bleared eyes of sections were learning to see each other clearer and to love each other better. He was melting bitterness in the warmth of his patrial sympathies, sections were being linked in the logic of his liquid sentences, and when he died he was literally loving a Nation into peace.

Fit and dramatic climax to a glorious mission, that he should have lived to carry the South’s last and greatest message to the center of the Nation’s culture, and then, with the gracious answer to his transcendent service locked in his loyal heart, come home to die among the people he had served! Fitter still, that, as he walked in final triumph through the streets of his beloved city, he should have caught upon his kingly head that wreath of Southern roses—richer jewels than Victoria wears—plucked by the hands of Georgia women, borne by the hands of Georgia men, and flung about him with a loving tenderness that crowned him for his burial, that, in the unspeakable fragrance of Georgia’s full and sweet approval, 381he might “draw the drapery of his couch about him, and lie down to pleasant dreams.”

If I should seek to touch the core of all his greatness, I would lay my hand upon his heart. I should speak of his humanity—his almost inspired sympathies, his sweet philanthropy and the noble heartfulness that ran like a silver current through his life. His heart was the furnace where he fashioned all his glowing speech. Love was the current that sent his golden sentences pulsing through the world, and in the honest throb of human sympathies he found the anchor that held him steadfast to all things great and true. He was the incarnate triumph of a heartful man.

I thank God, as I stand above my buried friend, that there is not one ignoble memory in all the shining pathway of his fame! In all the glorious gifts that God Almighty gave him, not one was ever bent to willing service in unworthy cause. He lived to make the world about him better. With all his splendid might he helped to build a happier, heartier and more wholesome sentiment among his kind. And in fondness, mixed with reverence, I believe that the Christ of Calvary, who died for men, has found a welcome sweet for one who fleshed within his person the golden spirit of the New Commandment and spent his powers in glorious living for his race.

O brilliant and incomparable Grady! We lay for a season thy precious dust beneath the soil that bore and cherished thee, but we fling back against all our brightening skies the thoughtless speech that calls thee dead! God reigns and his purpose lives, and although these brave lips are silent here, the seeds sown in this incarnate eloquence will sprinkle patriots through the years to come, and perpetuate thy living in a race of nobler men!

But all our words are empty, and they mock the air. If we would speak the eulogy that fills this day, let us build within this city that he loved, a monument tall as his services, and noble as the place he filled. Let every Georgian lend a hand, and as it rises to confront in majesty 382his darkened home, let the widow who weeps there be told that every stone that makes it has been sawn from the solid prosperity that he builded, and that the light which plays upon its summit is, in afterglow, the sunshine that he brought into the world.

And for the rest—silence. The sweetest thing about his funeral was that no sound broke the stillness, save the reading of the Scriptures and the melody of music. No fire that can be kindled upon the altar of speech can relume the radiant spark that perished yesterday. No blaze born in all our eulogy can burn beside the sunlight of his useful life. After all there is nothing grander than such living.

I have seen the light that gleamed at midnight from the headlight of some giant engine rushing onward through the darkness, heedless of opposition, fearless of danger, and I thought it was grand. I have seen the light come over the eastern hills in glory, driving the lazy darkness like mist before a sea-born gale, till leaf and tree, and blade of grass glittered in the myriad diamonds of the morning ray; and I thought it was grand.

I have seen the light that leaped at midnight athwart the storm-swept sky, shivering over chaotic clouds, mid howling winds, till cloud and darkness and the shadow-haunted earth flashed into mid-day splendor, and I knew it was grand. But the grandest thing, next to the radiance that flows from the Almighty Throne, is the light of a noble and beautiful life, wrapping itself in benediction ’round the destinies of men, and finding its home in the blessed bosom of the Everlasting God!

SPEECH OF GOVERNOR GORDON.

Mr. Chairman and Fellow-Citizens: The news of Henry Grady’s death reached me at a quiet country retreat in a distant section of the State. The grief of that rural community, as deep and sincere as the shock produced by his death was great and unexpected, told more feelingly and eloquently than any words of mine possibly can, the universality 383of the love and admiration of all her people for Georgia’s peerless son.

It is no exaggeration to say that the humblest and the highest, the poorest and richest—all classes, colors and creeds, with an unspeakable sorrow, mourn his death as a public calamity. It is no exaggeration to say that no man lives who can take his place. It is no extravagant eulogy to declare that scarcely any half-dozen men, by their combined efforts, can fill in all departments the places which he filled in his laborious and glorious life.

His wonderful intellect, enabling him, without apparent effort, to master the most difficult and obtuse public questions, and to treat them with matchless grace and power; his versatile genius, which made him at once the leader in great social reforms, as well as in gigantic industrial movements—that genius which made him at once the eloquent advocate, the logical expounder, the wise organizer, the vigorous executive—all these rich and unrivaled endowments, justify in claiming for him a place among the greatest and most gifted of this or any age.

But splendid as were his intellectual abilities, it is the boundless generosity of his nature, his sweet and loving spirit, his considerate and tender charity, exhaustless as a fountain of living waters, refreshing and making happy all hearts around him, these are the characteristics on which I love most to dwell. It is no wonder that his splendid genius attracted the gaze and challenged the homage of the continent. It is perhaps even a less wonder that a man with such boundless sympathies for his fellow men and so prodigal with his own time and talent and money in the service of the public, should be so universally and tenderly loved.

The career of Henry Grady is more than unique. It constitutes a new chapter in human experience. No private citizen in the whole eventful history of this Republic ever wore a chaplet so fadeless or linked his name so surely with deathless immortality. His name as a journalist and orator, his brilliant and useful life, his final crowning 384triumph, especially the circumstances of martyrdom surrounding his death, making it like that of the giant of holy writ, as we trust, more potential than ever in intellectual prowess of magic of the living man—all these will conspire not more surely to carry his fame to posterity, than will his deeds of charity and ready responses to those who needed his effective help, serve to endear to our hearts and memories, as long as life shall last, the memory of Henry W. Grady.

Governor Gordon’s tribute was the last of the sad occasion.

At its conclusion Dr. H. C. Morrison pronounced the benediction, and the curtain was drawn on the final public exercises of the most memorable funeral service the South has ever known.

But the memory of the loved and illustrious dead will linger long with his bereaved people.

A GRADY Memorial Meeting was held at Macon, Ga., on the evening of Thursday, December 26, 1889. The Academy of Music was filled with an assemblage of citizens of all classes. The meeting was called to order by Mr. F. H. Richardson, and the exercises were opened with an impressive prayer by Rev. T. R. Kendall, pastor of Mulberry Street Church. In announcing the object of the meeting, Mr. Richardson, who presided, said:

ADDRESS OF MR. RICHARDSON.

Fellow-Citizens: We have assembled to-night to honor the memory of a good and useful man; to express our sincere regrets that death has closed a high career in the meridian of its splendor; to voice our sympathy with the grief which this public loss has carried to every part of our State.

This is an occasion without precedent in the history of Macon. Never before have its people given such tribute to the memory of a private citizen. But when has such a private citizen lived, when has such a one died in Georgia? In speaking of my dear, dead friend I trust I do not pass the bounds of exact and proper statement when I say that there was not within the limits of these United States any man unburdened by office, unadorned by the insignia of triumphs in the fields of war, or the arena of politics, whose death would have been so generally deplored as is that of Henry W. Grady. It will be our privilege and pleasure to hear testimony of his genius and his virtues from the representatives of five organizations; the Press, the Chamber of Commerce of Macon, the resident alumni 386of the State University, the City Government, and the Chi Phi Fraternity. Each of these has good reason to honor the memory of Henry Grady. The press can fashion no eulogy richer than his desert, for his was the most illustrious pen that has flashed in Southern journalism during this generation. The Chamber of Commerce cannot accord him too much praise, for, though himself unskilled in the science of trade, he was the chief promoter of public enterprise in his city and set an example worthy the emulation of any man whose ambition looks to the promotion of commercial and industrial progress. Surely the Alumni of the State University should honor him, for he was the most famous man who has left the classic halls of Athens in many a year. It is well that the City Government joins in this general tribute to the lamented dead. He led his own city to high ideals and to large achievements. He preached the gospel of liberality as well as the creed of progress. While his devotion to his own city was supreme, from his lips there fell no word of scorn or malice for any other community. Let us emulate the catholicity of his patriotism. Atlanta was its central force and fire, but it extended to all Georgia, to all these States and, passing beyond the boundaries of his own county, was transformed into a love for all mankind. The Chi Phi Fraternity had much cause to love Henry Grady. Only those of us who know the full meaning of the mystic bonds of that brotherhood can appreciate the ardor and enthusiasm of his devotion to it. There was that in him which was nobler and worthier of commemoration than even his radiant genius. Powerful as he was with the pen, persuasive as he was in his masterful control of the witchery of eloquence, fascinating as was his personality, he had a still better claim to honor than could be founded on these distinctions. After all, the best fame is that which, though not sought, is won by goodness, charity, and brotherly love. Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem is lovelier than the mightiest of the Moorish Kings. Henry Grady concerned himself to do good unto others. He kindled the fire on 387cold hearth stones, he cared for the sick and the forsaken, he visited the prisoner, he carried consolation to the desolate. His works of mercy, tenderness, and love do live after him, and they are the crowning beauty of his work in this world. The tear of gratitude that trickles down the cheek of the orphan is a purer jewel than ever sparkled in the crown of political fame. The simple thanks of the friendless and oppressed make sweeter music to the soul than the applause of senates. These priceless rewards were showered upon him in recognition of many an untold deed of charity and grace. His life has been concluded when, according to human wisdom, it seemed most desirable that he should linger among the walks of men. Silence has set its seal on his eloquent lips when their words seemed sweetest. His great, tender heart has been hushed forever, when from the life it quickened there were going forth influences of large and increasing beneficence.

Capt. J. L. Hardeman was then introduced, and he read the following resolutions framed by the committee from the meeting of the various bodies held last Tuesday:

RESOLUTIONS.

The death of Henry Grady is a great blow to the hopes of the South. He had become one of the foremost men of the day in her behalf. His leadership was as unique as it was controlling. He held no office, he sought no preferment, and yet he was a leader. History furnishes but few examples like this, none that can excel him in the sublime usefulness of his career. His patriotism was so lofty that one cannot measure it by the standards of the hour. His soul was filled to running over with a deep love for his people and the sufferings they had endured, and those to which fanaticism might expose them. This love was his inspiration. It moved, it commanded the largest exercise of his versatile genius under an infinite variety of circumstances. And in all of these, whether as editor, writer, orator or citizen, he buried far out of sight every consideration of self and wrought for the people’s good. And his work was on a plane as exalted as his highest aspirations. No taint of gain ever touched his hand; no surrender of principle ever marred the colors of the banner he bore. What though in a passing moment he may have differed with others upon minor matters, yet in all the great and burning questions which so vitally concern the people 388of the South and of the Union, he was abreast and ahead of nearly all others. In his life every element of success was materialized, an energy as untiring as the tides of the sea; a courage like the eagle’s that gazes with eye undimmed upon the glare of the noonday sun; a genius so comprehensive that it grasped with equal facility the smallest detail and the broadest of human issues, and above all, a patriotism pure, heroic, unsectional, drawing its inspiration from the sacred fountain head of American liberty, and spreading its benign influence wherever the Constitution is obeyed and the rights of mankind respected. And thus he worked in the fore front till death overtook him. In this hour of mourning, how heavily do we feel his loss. The great purpose of life was just planned out. The certainty of its fulfillment could rest alone with him. To lead his people onward and upward through all the harassing difficulties which beset them to the full fruition of constitutional liberty in its widest meaning, was his purpose. Not alone by his splendid oratory did he seek to attain this end; to this end he devoted his pen as an editor, and to this end he also devoted those beautiful traits of his private character, which made him loved by all who knew him. His unfinished work is yet to be accomplished. The young Moses of the Southland is gone, and may the people not wander from his teachings. The people of Macon assembled to do honor to the illustrious dead

Resolve, That in the death of Henry W. Grady, the State of Georgia has lost one of her noblest sons, the Union a man who was a patriotic lover of constitutional liberty.

Resolve, That in the death of Henry W. Grady, the city of Atlanta has been deprived of a noble, energetic and unselfish citizen, who was devoted to her interests.

Resolve, That we tender our sympathies as a people to the family of the deceased, and that a copy of these resolutions be forwarded to them.

In moving the adoption of the resolutions, he said:

Mr. Chairman: In moving the adoption of this, the report of your committee, I can but say that to-night emphasizes the words of Jerusalem’s King: “A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.” Death came to him as a benediction that followed a sacrifice. Warned by his physician that he was ill, cavalier of the South alone he 389marched to battle for her, uninspired by the enthusiasm of a battle array, yet within cannon shot of Bunker Hill, and where he could feel the spray from Plymouth Rock, he fought a gallant fight for us, and leaving the field victor, amidst the plaudits of those he had conquered, he hastened home to complete his sacrifice; and the same angel that bade him leave this world spoke not only to the soul of Henry W. Grady, but to all the people North and South: “Peace, be still.”

The resolutions were unanimously adopted by a rising vote.

Professor G. R. Glenn was then introduced and read the following preamble and resolution on the part of the committee of alumni:

ALUMNI RESOLUTIONS.

It is no ordinary occasion that calls us together. That was no ordinary light that went out in the gray mists of early dawn. It was no ordinary life that has so suddenly and so strangely come down to its close. To those of us who were University students with him, who knew his University career, the story of his splendid accomplishments has more than ordinary significance, and the heart-breaking tragedy of his sudden taking off a profound meaning.

We had a personal sympathy in every stride of his struggling manhood: we carried a personal pride to every wonderful achievement of his growing genius: we hailed with fraternal joy every popular triumph of his intellectual prowess; we joined in every glad shout that told how victoriously his unselfish love was commanding sway over the American heart; and when he is stricken down we bow our heads in sorrow, as only those can who know the sources from which he drew the inspirations of his life.

He came from the University of Georgia in those palmy days from ’66 to ’72, when Lipscomb and Mell and W. L. Brown and Waddell and Rutherford and Charbonnier and Jones and Smead—names that some of us will teach our boys to pronounce tenderly and reverently—were at their greatest and best. In this company gathered here are those who know the meaning and the moulding power of great character builders like these. The great soul of the venerable Chancellor Lipscomb, that grand arch priest of higher learning, made its impress on the soul of the young man at Athens. Some of us can trace that impress, and the impress of the University of those days, through all 390his after life down to that Boston speech, aye, even to the delirium of that last sickness, when his thought was for others rather than of himself.

Moulded to be generous, broad-minded, tolerant, unselfish, magnanimous, aspiring, noble, who may tell us what climax this divinely gifted, sunny soul might not have reached if his rich and kingly life might have been spared to his race. The education that he received was an evolution of the best and most royal in manhood. It was fashioned on this pattern—the germ thoughts of his life took root in his home and branched out to his friends, overshadowed this city, sent their far-reaching and strengthening arms over every portion of his State, and then towered grandly above his section. Yea, and had began to bear fruit for the healing of the nation, when alas, alas, an inscrutable Providence cuts him down. But, thank God, that matchless tongue, now silent forever, was not hushed till, above Atlanta, above Georgia, above the South, above the whole country, the undying eloquence of that Boston speech rose in majestic waves over city, state, section and country, and sent the far-thrilling echoes into the eternal depths of our common humanity. There it is—from his home, through the university life, through the splendid work in his editorial chair, on the rostrum, in every forward movement of his soul to that last grand plea to the national heart, and down into the delirium of the death chamber, it is the evolution of the noblest and the best. The heart that made the sunniest home in Atlanta warmed everything it touched, from the son of the Puritan on Plymouth Rock, to the grey-haired old freedman that goes with tottering step and slow to join old master and old missus behind the sunset hills.

The University has sent out many sons who have honored her in filling large places in the history of our State and country. Hill and Stephens and Toombs, the Cobbs, and Jacksons, and Lumpkins, and Crawfords, and Gordons, and a long line of immortal names, have illustrated her worth in the professions, in the field, and in the forum. Of the many bright and brightening names of her younger sons, the name of Grady easily led all the rest, and now that he is gone, the almost universal cry is, who among those that are left is great enough to fill his place. In the words of one who had much to do in moulding his intellectual life: “Ulysses is away on his wandering and there is none left in Ithaca strong enough to bend his bow.”

Resolved, That in the death of Henry W. Grady the Alumni of the University of Georgia have lost from their ranks a man who illustrated the best that comes from University education.

Resolved, That his career furnishes to our young men a shining example of one who, choosing his life-work, loved it with an unwavering love, believed in it with an unalterable and tireless devotion and reached success and eminence before he had rounded two-score years.

391Resolved, That we recognize and commend the unselfish and generous love of our brother for his own race and for the human race—a love that was so warm and genial that it won men to him as if by magic. Here was the motive power that developed and drove his great brain. Here was the “open sesame” that unlocked for him those treasure-houses of grand thoughts for humanity that are forever barred to cold-hearted and self-seeking men.

Resolved, That we very tenderly and lovingly commend to our Heavenly Father the loved ones about his own hearthstone. We cannot understand this blow, but we bow in submission to the Judge of all the earth, who will do right.

Resolved, That copies of this preamble and resolutions be furnished to his family, and to the Macon and Atlanta papers for publication.

These resolutions were also unanimously adopted.

Mr. John T. Boifeuillet, representing the press of Macon, spoke as follows:

ADDRESS OF MR. BOIFEUILLET.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: The silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken, and the most brilliant light in American journalism is veiled in darkness. The crystal spirit has returned to the bright realm from whence it came, as an evangel of peace, hope and mercy.

The star was rapidly ascending to the zenith of its greatest brilliancy and magnitude when suddenly it disappeared below the horizon, but across the journalistic firmament of the country it has left an effulgent track whose reflection illuminates the world.

Henry Grady’s sun-bright intellect shone with a splendor that dazzled the eyes of men, and made luminous the pages traced by his magnetic pen. The cold type sparkled with the fires of his genius. His writings breathed a spirit of sweetness and good-will. They were inspired by lofty purposes and earnest endeavor, free from all suspicion of selfishness or insincerity. No shadow of doubt fell across the sunshine of his truth.

392Wherever a sunbeam wandered, or a tear-drop glistened; wherever a perishing life trod upon the ebbing tide; wherever beauty sat garlanded, or grief repined, there Grady was, singing his loves and binding rainbow hopes around the darkest despair. His harp was strung in harmony with the chords of the human heart.

When God in his eternal council conceived the thought of man’s creation, he called to him the three ministers who wait constantly upon the throne, Justice, Truth, and Mercy, and thus addressed them: “Shall we make man?” Then said Justice: “O God, make him not, for he will trample upon the laws.” Truth made answer also: “O God, make him not, for he will pollute the sanctuaries.” But Mercy, dropping upon her knees, and looking up through her tears, exclaimed: “O God, make him—and I will watch over him with my care through all the dark paths which he may have to tread!” Then God made man, and said to him: “O man, thou art the child of Mercy; go and deal with thy brother.”

So, Henry Grady, a ministering angel of mercy on earth, faithfully tried, throughout his life, in his conduct toward his fellow-man, to follow the Divine injunction given at man’s creation morn. His pen was never dipped in malice or bitterness, but was always lifted in behalf of charity, love and kindness; in behalf of progress, industry and enterprise; in behalf of the South and her institutions—his State and her people.

Some men burst to shatters by their own furious notion, others in the course of nature simply cease to shine; some dart through the period of their existence like meteors through the sky, leaving as little impression behind and having with it a connection equally as slight, while others enter it so thoroughly that the time becomes identified with them. To this latter class belonged Henry Grady.

His pen improved the agriculture of the South; it 393advanced the material interest and substantial growth of Georgia; it advocated industrial training for the youths and maidens of the land; it developed the poetry of the State; it elevated the morals of men and purified their character; it created noble aspirations in the human heart; it implanted seeds of benevolence, charity and liberality; it taught the lesson of self-abnegation and forgiveness; it inculcated principles of patriotism and love of country; it softened animosities between the North and South, and clasped the hands of the two sections in fraternal greeting. His pen built Atlanta, it aided in building up Georgia; it established expositions that were a credit to the State and a glory to her people; it accumulated by one editorial $85,000 for the erection of a Y. M. C. A. building; it collected the fund for the erection of the Confederate soldiers’ home, which will ever stand as a monument to his patriotism and fidelity. When winter clasped Atlanta in its icy embrace, and the poor were suffering from hunger and cold, his pleading pen made the God-favored people of that city, who sat within places of wealth and comfort, by glowing fires and bountifully laden tables, hear the wail of the orphan and the cry of the widow; purse-strings were unfastened, cold hearts thawed under the magnetic warmth of his melting pathos, and in a few hours there was not an empty larder or a fireless home among the poor of Georgia’s great capital. Whether engaged in making governors and senators, or preparing a Christmas dinner for newsboys, whether occupied in building a church or forming a Chautauqua; whether constructing a railroad or erecting some eleemosynary institution, his pen was powerful and his influence potent. It has left its impress upon the tablets of the world’s memory, and the name of Henry Grady, the great pacificator, will live in song and story until the sundown of time.

According to a contemporary, Henry Grady, while a beardless student at college, wrote a letter to the Atlanta Constitution, which was his first newspaper experience. The sparkle and dash of the communication so pleased the 394editor of the paper, that when the first press convention after the war was tendered a ride over the State road, the editor telegraphed his boyish correspondent, who had then returned to his home in Athens, that he wished to have him represent the Constitution on that trip, and write up the country and its resources along the line of the road. Mr. Grady accepted the commission, and of all the hundreds of letters written on the occasion, his, over the signature of “King Hans,” were most popular and most widely copied. He became editor and one of the proprietors of the Rome Daily Commercial, a sprightly, newsy, and enterprising journal. Rome, however, was at that time too small to support a daily paper on such a scale, and in 1872 Mr. Grady purchased an interest in the Atlanta Herald. Here he found room and opportunity for his soaring wings, and the Herald became one of the most brilliant papers ever published in Georgia. In 1876 he became connected with the Constitution. By this time his editorial abilities had made him many friends at home and abroad, and James Gordon Bennett at once made him the Southern representative of the New York Herald. On this journal Mr. Grady did some of the best work of his life. He rapidly regained all that he had lost in his ventures, and in 1880 purchased a fourth interest in the Constitution, taking the position of managing editor, which he held at the time of his death. His career in that capacity is a matter of proud and brilliant history. He had just commenced an interesting series of valuable letters to the New York Ledger when he was stricken down with fatal sickness, even while the plaudits of the admiring multitude were ringing in his ears and the press of the country was singing his praises.

The last editorial Grady wrote was the beautiful and soulful tribute on the death of Jefferson Davis; and on the eve of Mr. Grady’s departure from Atlanta for Boston he sounded the bugle-call for funds to help erect a monument to the peerless champion of the “Lost Cause.” How strange, indeed, that the illustrious leader and sage of the Old South and the brilliant and fearless apostle of the New 395South, should pass away so near together. Ben Hill died, and his place has never been supplied in Georgia. Mr. Grady approached nearer to it than any other man. Now Grady is gone, and his duplicate cannot be found in the State. Society was blessed by his living and his State advanced by his usefulness and excellence.

Like the great Cicero, who, when quitting Rome, took from among his domestic divinities the ivory statue of Minerva, the protectress of Rome, and consecrated it in the temple, to render it inviolable to the spoilers, so Henry Grady, when leaving his college halls to enter upon a brilliant life in the journalistic world, took with him to the oracles the statue of pure thought, and after its consecration, to protect and preserve it in his bosom, it became to him a shield and buckler. Thus armed he went forward to the battle of life, determined to do his whole duty to his country, his God and truth. How well he succeeded, the voice of admiring humanity proclaims, and the angels of heaven have recorded. He vanquished all opposition and waved his triumphant banner over every field of conflict.

His thoughts were sparks struck from the mind of Deity, immortal in their character and duration. They were active, energizing, beautiful, and refined. His mind was like a precious bulb, putting forth its shoots and blooming its flowers, warmed by the sunshine and watered by the showers. It was like a beautiful blade, burnished and brightened, and as it flashed in the sunlight it mirrored his kingly soul and knightly spirit.

Looking back at the ages that have rolled by in the revolutions of time, what have we remaining of the past but the thoughts of men? Where is magnificent Babylon with her palaces, her artificial lakes and hanging gardens that were the pride and luxury of her vicious inhabitants; where is majestic Nineveh, that proud mistress of the East with her monuments of commercial enterprise and prosperity? Alas! they are no more. Tyre, that great city, into whose lap the treasures of the world were poured, she too is no more. The waves of the sea now roll where once 396stood the immense and sumptuous palaces of Tyrian wealth. Temples, arches and columns may crumble to pieces and be swept into the sea of oblivion; nature may decay and races of men come and go like the mists of the morning before the rising sun, but the proud monuments of Henry Grady’s mind will survive the wrecks of matter and the shocks of time.

On the Piedmont heights peacefully sleeps the freshness of the heart of the New South, cut down in the grandeur of his fame and in the meridian of his powers, in the glory of his life and in the richest prime of his royal manhood. His brow is wreathed with laurel. Costly marble will mark the place of his head, and beautiful flowers bloom at his feet. There the birds will carol their vespers, and gentle breezes breathe fragrance o’er his grave. The sun in his dying splendor, ere sinking to rest amid the clouds that veil the “golden gate,” will linger to kiss the majestic monument reared by loving hearts, and with a flood of beauty bathe it in heavenly glory. And then the blush fades, even as it fades from the face of a beautiful woman. Shadows begin to climb the hillside, and nature sleeps, lulled by the soft music of the singing wind. The stars, the bright forget-me-nots of the angels, come out to keep their vigils o’er the sleeping dust of him whose soul hath gone

Major J. F. Hanson, as the representative of the Chamber of Commerce, said:

ADDRESS OF MAJOR HANSON.

It would be impossible at this short distance in point of time from the final struggle in which Mr. Grady yielded up his life, to form a just estimate of his character, his attainments and his work. These have passed into history, and will survive the mournful demonstrations of his people, because of their loss in his sudden and unexpected death.

To many of you he was personally known, while, with 397the people of Georgia, his name was a household word. In his chosen profession he will rank with Lamar and Watterson. With these exceptions, in the field of Southern journalism, he was without a rival or a peer, while, as an orator, his brilliant efforts had attracted the attention and won the plaudits of the entire country.

His speeches before the New England Society, at Dallas, Texas, Augusta, Georgia, the University of Virginia, and finally at Boston, constitute the record upon which must rest his claim to statesmanship.

While the people of the South, with one voice, approve the purpose manifested in these matchless efforts to maintain the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon in the public affairs of this section, there are differences of opinion with reference to the methods, which, by implication at least, he was supposed to have approved, for the accomplishment of this purpose. If, at this point, there was real or apparent conflict with the broad spirit of nationalism, for which at other times he pleaded so often and so eloquently, it is but fair to attribute it to the supreme conviction on his part that, through white supremacy in the South, by whatever means maintained, this end was to be secured.

However we may differ with reference to the methods which, as a last alternative, he would have employed, or their final effect upon the institutions of our country, we recognize the great purpose which inspired his efforts in our behalf. Because this is true, the people of the South will keep his memory green, whatever the opinion of the world may be with reference to this question.

In the material development of the South, and her future prosperity, power and glory, his faith was complete. He labored without interruption during his entire career to promote these great results, and impressed himself upon his section in its new growth and new life, more than any man of his time. The wonderful growth of his own city was due to the broad liberality and supreme confidence in its future with which he inspired the people of Atlanta.

Phenomenal as his career has been during the past few 398years, he had not reached the zenith of his powers, and what he accomplished gave promise of greater achievements which the future had in store for him, of increasing fame, and for his State a richer heritage in his name. It is doubtful if he fully understood, or had ever tested to the limit his power as an orator. As occasion increased the demand upon him, he measured up to its full requirements, until his friends had grown confident of new and greater triumphs.

We shall miss him much. His faults (and faults he had like other men) are forgotten in view of his service to his friends, his home, his State and his country, and of his untimely death, when the highest honors which his people could bestow were gathering about him.

If he had not reached the meridian of his powers, he died in the fullness of a great fame, and we turn from his grave sorrowing, but not without hope, for we leave him in the hands of that Providence which knoweth best, and doeth all things well.

Judge Emory Speer, for the resident alumni of the University of Georgia, said:

JUDGE SPEER’S ADDRESS.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is instinctive with civilized humanity to honor the illustrious dead. This animating impulse is as practical and beneficent in its results to the living, as it is righteous and compensating to those glorious natures who have consecrated their lives to the service of their country and of mankind.

The youthful Athenian might contemplate the statue to Demosthenes, and with emulation kindled by the story of his eloquence and his courage, might resolve that his own lips shall be touched as with the honey of Hybla, and that he will, if needful, lead the people against another Phillip. The Switzer lad, bowed before the altar in the chapel of William Tell, will unconsciously swear forever to defend the independence of his mountain home. The American 399youth, standing where the monument to the Father of his Country throws its gigantic shadow across the tranquil bosom of the Potomac, with elevation of soul and patriotic animation will exclaim: I, too, am an American and a freeman. And, sir, this characteristic of a generous and great people finds unexampled expression in the conduct of our country towards the memory of its soldiers, its statesmen, its patriots, its philanthropists. They are enshrined in the hearts of a grateful people.

In obedience to this vitalizing and commanding influence of a noble people, in deference to the designation of his brothers and mine, in the beautiful association and sacred memories of alma mater, I come to place a simple chaplet upon the grave of Henry Grady, an humble votive offering at the shrine he has merited and won in the Valhalla of the American people. Perhaps, sir, in all this vast congregation there is not one man who knew as I knew our dead brother in the happy and halcyon days of our childhood. Thirty years ago we were boys together. Together we attended the little school in the shadow of the great university buildings, taught by a noble woman, the daughter of the venerable Dr. Church, the president of Franklin College. Henry was then remarkable for his sunny nature, his generous disposition, his superabundant flow of good-humor and spirited energy. Beautifully proportioned, agile, swift of foot, sinewy and strong for his age, he was easily the leader of our childish sports. Among his young companions he was even then the popular favorite he has ever been. In the revolution of the “Great Iron Wheel,” (an allusion which all good Methodists will understand), I was borne away at the end of the year, and Henry Grady 400for years went out of my life. A year later the dun clouds of war enveloped the country. Five years elapsed, and when I returned to Athens in September, 1866, to enter the sophomore class at the University, there was Grady rising junior. The beautiful boy had become a beautiful youth. His sunny nature had become even brighter. His generosity had become a fault. When I had known him in ’59, his father was perhaps the most successful and enterprising merchant of Northeast Georgia. He was a sturdy North Carolinian with that robustness and shrewd vigor of intellectuality which, with men from that section, has seemed, in many instances, to dispense with the necessity of elaborate culture. A soldier and officer of the confederacy, he had fallen at the head of his regiment, in one of the desperate battles on the lines at Petersburg, when the immortal army of Northern Virginia had, in the language of the gallant Gordon, been “fought to a frazzle.” The brave soldier and thrifty merchant had left a large estate. Grady was living with his mother, in that lovely, old-fashioned home of which, in Boston, he caught the vision, “with its lofty pillars, and white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air.”

His college life was a miracle of sweetness and goodness; never did a glass of wine moisten his lips. Never did an oath or an obscene word defile that tongue whose honeyed accents in time to come were to persuade the millions of the fidelity and patriotism of the people he loved. Well do I remember the look of amazement, of indulgent but all intrepid forbearance, which came into his face when one day a college bully offered to insult him. In those days of innumerable college flirtations he had but one sweetheart, and she the beautiful girl who became his wife and is now the mother of his children, and his bereaved and disconsolate widow.

This sweetness of disposition ran through his whole life. If the great journal of which he became an editor was engaged in an acrimonious controversy, some other writer was detailed to conduct it. Grady had no taste for controversy 401of any acrid sort, and I recall but perhaps one exception in his whole editorial life. But while he would never quarrel, I had the best right to know, when the emergency came, he had the intrepidity of a hero. Well do I remember the outcome of a thoughtlessly cruel practical joke, which resulted in showing me and many others the splendid fire of his courage. Early in my college life, as Grady and I were walking in a dark night on the lonely streets of Cobham to a supposed meeting of the Chi Phi Fraternity we were waylaid by a number of our college-mates. I was in the secret, Grady was not. A huge navy revolver, with every cylinder loaded with blank cartridges, had been thrust upon him as a means of defense from a band of mythical outlaws, who had made purely imaginary threats of the bloodiest description against everybody in general and the students of the university in particular. Grady put the revolver in his pocket and promised to stand by me, and well did he redeem the promise. We started and as we passed a dark grove near the residence of General Howell Cobb the band of supposed assassins rushed upon us with demoniac yells, and firing a veritable mitraille of pistol shots with powder charges. Thoughtless boy that I was. I shouted a defiance to the assassins and called to Grady to stand by me, and I gave shot for shot as fast as I could pull the trigger. The dear fellow had not the slightest doubt that we were assailed by overwhelming odds by armed desperate foes, but he stood by my side, firing straight at the on-rushing foe, until, and not until, after several volleys I was shot dead and dropped to the ground; when, being overpowered by numbers, and his ally killed, he made a masterly retreat. Dear, kindly, gallant nature, little didst thou deem that this boyish prank, practiced by those whose familiar love embolden them, and all in the riotous exuberance of careless youth would so soon be recalled when thou wert gone, recalled with sighs and tears to testify that thy gentle life had under its kindly surface a soul as fearless as ever “swarmed up the breach at Ascalon.”

402Grady, as a writer and orator, was surpassed by no student of the University, although he was doubtless the youngest member of his class. Always, however, more successful in his efforts to advance the political fortunes of others than of himself, he was defeated for anniversarian of the Phi Kappa society by one vote; but, as I remember, he bore off the equal distinction of commencement orator, each society, at that time, having the right to elect one of its members to that position. He did not graduate with class honor, and perhaps fortunately. It is too often true that honor men mistake the text-books which are merely the keys to the understanding, for objects worthy of ultimate pursuit and mastery, and we sometimes find these gentlemen grubbing for Greek roots and construing abstruse problems, while the great, busy, throbbing world is passing them by, and has forgotten their existence. From the University of Georgia, Grady went to the University of Virginia. Great tidings of his success came back to us; we did not doubt that in any contest which would try the temper of the man he would roll the proud scions of the first families of Virginia in the humiliating dust of defeat. Sore indeed were the lamentations, vociferous our denials of a free ballot and a fair count, when we learned that he had been defeated in the society contest there; again, as I remember, by one vote. He came back to Georgia and to journalism, and from that moment his history is common property. Others have spoken, or will speak, of his accomplishments in turning the Pactolian streams of capital into the channels of Southern investment, of the numberless enterprises to which he brought his lucidity of statement, his captivating powers of argumentation, his magnetic methods for the inspiration of others. The monuments of the vast and far-reaching designs stand out all over this broad land; gigantic factories, their tall chimneys towering toward the sky, mighty railroads stretching through the mountains of Georgia, where Tallulah and Tugalo rush downward toward the sea, where hard by Toccoa dashes its translucent waves to spray. Others, far away toward 403the shore of the Mexican Gulf, whose languid waves, impelled by the soft winds of the tropics, cast the sea foam on the snowy blossoms of the magnolia and the golden fruitage of the orange, mines have been opened and earth made to surrender from subterranean stores her hidden wealth at the touch of his magical wand. Unnumbered beneficent projects attest his genius and his philanthropy. But, not content to evolve the treasures of physical nature, he labored incessantly to provide methods to develop the mentality of the youth of the State. As a trustee of the University, and an active member of its Alumni society; as one in control of that mighty engine of public thought, the great paper of which he was an editor, his influence was looking and moving ever toward the light. He knew that popular ignorance was the greatest danger to liberty, the greatest foe to national prosperity. He knew that if the terrible potency of its groping in darkness and prejudice could but once, like the blind Samson, grasp the pillar of society in its muscular arms, it would put forth its baleful strength and whelm every social interest in crushing, appalling disaster and irremediable ruin.

The most tolerant of men, the life of our dear brother was one of long protest against the narrowness of partisanship and sectional bigotry. He was the most independent of thinkers.

He demonstrated to the people of both sections of our once divided country, that we might love and honor the traditions of our Confederacy, and with absolute loyalty and devotion to the Union as restored. He made it plain to the minds of the Northern people that while it was impossible for an ex-Confederate soldier or the children of his blood, to recall without a kindling eye and a quickening pulse the swift march, the stubborn retreat, the intrepid advance, the charging cry of the gallant gray lines as they swept forward to the attack, the red-cross battle-flags as their bullet-torn folds were borne aloft in the hands of heroes along the fiery crest of battle. But he made it plain also that these are but the emotions and expressions of 404pride that a brave people cherish in the memories of their manhood, in the record of their soldierly devotion. Are we less imbued with the spirit of true Americanism on this account? No, forever, no! Are the sons of Rupert’s cavaliers, or Cromwell’s Ironsides less true to England and her constitution, because their fathers charged home in opposing squadrons at Edgehill and Naseby? Do not Englishmen the world over cherish the common heritage of their common valor? Have Scotchmen, who fought side by side with the English in the deserts of the Soudan, or the jungles of Burmah, forgotten the memories of Bannockburn, of Bruce, and of Wallace?

The time will come—aye, it is present—when the heroism of the gray and of the blue, is a common element of America’s military power. I repeat, it is now. There is not a war officer in the civilized world in comparing the power of his own country with that of ours, who does not estimate man for man as soldiers of the Union, the fighting strength of the Confederacy.

The statesmen of the Old World know that underlying all of the temporary questions of the hour—underlying all the resounding disputes, whether in the language of Emerson, “James or Jonathan shall sit in the chair and hold the purse,” the great patriotic heart of the people is true to the constitution of the fathers, true to republican government, true to the sovereignty of the people, true to the gorgeous ensign of our country.

In the presence of this knowledge, in the presence of that mighty mission which under the providence of God has grown and expanded day by day and century by century since Columbus, from his frail caravel, beheld rising before his enraptured vision the nodding palms and gleaming shores of another continent, the mission to confer upon humanity the power and privilege of government by the people and for the people, should be the chiefest care of our countrymen. Of this mission Grady spoke with an eloquence so elevated and so inspired that it seemed as if the voices of the waiting angels were whispering to his 405prophetic intelligence messages of peace, joy and gladness to his countrymen. He said:

“A mighty duty, and a mighty inspiration, impels every one of us to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever divides. We, sir, are Americans—and we fight for human liberty! The uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth. France, Brazil—these are our victories. To redeem the earth from kingcraft and oppression—this is our mission! And we shall not fail. God has sown in our soil the seed of His millennial harvest, and He will not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until His full and perfect day has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown all the way—aye, even from the hour when, from the voiceless and trackless ocean, a new world rose to the sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that stupendous day—when the old world will come to marvel and to learn, amid our gathered treasures—let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past with the spectacle of a Republic compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love—loving from the Lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill—serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory—blazing out the path and making clear the way, up which all nations of the earth must come in God’s appointed time!”

We may imagine that this inspired utterance completed, there came to his glorious mentality another thought, another vision. Again he exclaims as once before to a mighty throng, and now to his own people:

“All this, my country, and no more can we do for you. As I look the vision grows, the splendor deepens, the horizon falls back, the skies open their everlasting gates, and the glory of the Almighty God streams through, as He looks down on His people who have given themselves unto Him, and leads them from one triumph to another until they have reached a glory unspeaking, and the whirling 406stars, as in their courses through Arcturus they run to the Milky Way, shall not look down on a better people or a happier land.”

Thus saying, his work was ended—his earthly pilgrimage was o’er. He went to sleep

Mr. Hugh V. Washington, representing the City Government, said:

ADDRESS OF MR. WASHINGTON.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: There is a songster peculiar to Southern woodland, who is without a rival. I have heard his song on a still summer night, and when it died away, the silence seemed deeper and more impressive. Georgia has given to the country an orator whose eloquence was peculiar to himself, and charmed every audience North, South and West, but that which made him dearest to Southern hearts was the theme he delighted to present; that voice was never raised except in behalf of the honor, the interest and the prosperity of his people, and to-night we know that that voice is silent forevermore. I have no words to measure the profound sorrow I feel for the death of Henry Grady; to say that his loss to the country cannot be estimated, and that there is no one to take his place, is but to express a thought common to all. His career as an orator dawned as that other great Georgian, Benn Hill, passed away. The first time I ever looked upon Jefferson Davis was when he stood in Atlanta amid a vast concourse to honor the memory of the eloquent and faithful Hill. I shall never forget that scene: there stood before me two types of Southern manhood, the one of the old, the other of the new; the venerable ex-president came upon the platform, and a glad shout arose from thousands of voices,—he stood the emblem and personification of all we held most dear in the past, but he belonged to the past. There arose to welcome him a young Georgian; his speech 407of welcome was a masterpiece, every nerve in that vast audience vibrated, and every voice was raised in deafening applause when Mr. Grady declared that the rising of that morning’s sun, bringing with it our beloved ex-president, brought greater joy to Southern hearts than any since the resurrection morn. Mr. Grady, cherishing in his heart of hearts the history of the Confederacy, seemed an inspiration of hope and promise; he seemed to stand for the Present and Future; and now within a few days of each other these noble men have gone to their rest, and the close of a joyous year finds our people bowed in sorrow over their graves. Mr. Grady’s mission in life traveled beyond State bounds. He was too big, too broad, too patriotic to be narrow or partisan; but he was a Georgian to the core,—he sprung from the red hills of classic Athens; he drank at the fountain of knowledge at the State University; what was nearest to Georgia was nearest to him, and he gave his life that the position of Georgia and her sister States of the South might be made clear to our brethren at the North; and to-night, by strange providence, his great work is closed, and he is sepulchered in the bosom of his native State, in Atlanta, whose greatness is due more to his efforts than to any other man.

The life of Henry Grady was like a rare and beautiful gem whose every side was resplendent with light; as a son he was what every mother might hope for in her boy; as a father he was tender and true; as a friend he was open-hearted and generous as the day; as a member of his old college fraternity none exceeded him in zeal and generosity; as an alumnus of the State University his fertile pen and brain were tireless in promoting its interests; as a writer he was at once forcible and fascinating in the highest degree; in journalism he disregarded old methods, and set a higher standard for American journalism; as an orator he had the force of Northern logic, and the beauty of Southern diction; but as much as we may admire him for these noble traits, yet it is in the life of Henry Grady, as a private citizen, that he reached the highest points of his character. I 408know of no other American citizen in the private walks of life comparable to him. He never sought or held public office; he had no record of a hundred battle-fields to make him famous; his life was filled with private charities, and every enterprise of his native State or city found a willing and powerful sympathizer in him. The many charitable institutions of Atlanta are before us as monuments to his zeal and generosity in behalf of the poor, the needy, and the forsaken. After twenty-five years, when the ranks of the Confederate veterans had been decimated to a handful by the hand of time, and our State was unable to provide a home for the scattered remnant, he conceived the plan of building in our capital city, by private benefaction, the Confederate Home. Wherever there is a man who wore the gray, there will his name be honored and revered. But it is useless to attempt an enumeration of the many enterprises which he fostered; wherever there was work to be done to promote the interest of his city, his State, or his country, he was ready to give his time, his labor, and his money. But there is another feature in the life of Henry Grady of which I would speak,—he was pre-eminently a man of the times and for the times, and in this critical juncture of our history he seemed to have been raised up by a special providence to carry the message of the South to the people of our common country; his aspirations were not only for the success and prosperity of his native section, but he desired to see all the States combined together in a community of interest, of prosperity, of thought, of aim, and of destiny; he brought to the attention of the country the most gigantic problem of this or any other time; he declared to the people of the North that the white people of the South were one people with those of the North; that they had the same traditions; the same blood; the same love of freedom, and the same lofty resolve to preserve their race unpolluted and free; and he brought to the discharge of this duty such masterful eloquence, such sincerity of conviction, such kindness of heart and liberality of thought, as to gain for him not only the 409applause, but the admiration and sympathy and attention of the whole country. Though the matchless orator lies still in death, the South owes to him a debt of gratitude, which could not be paid though a monument were erected to his memory higher than that which rises in the sunlight above Potomac’s wave. Though his voice be still, his words, his example, and his patriotism shall be cherished in the hearts of many generations. If I was asked to point to a man whose life should stand as a model to the young men of the South, I would point to that of the young Georgian, who has but so lately passed from among us.

The city of Macon, which I have the honor to represent, may well sorrow with our sister city of Atlanta, and we tender to his bereaved people our heartfelt sorrow and sympathy. Henry Grady stood as a prophet on the verge of the promised land, bidding the Southland leave the desert of reconstruction, of gloom and poverty behind it, and to enter with hope, and courage, and cheerfulness upon the rich inheritance that the future holds in store for us; and wherever truth, and courage, and unselfish performance of duty are appreciated, there will his name find an honored place on the roll of our country’s great names. And turning our thoughts and hearts toward his new-made grave, let us say, “Peace to his ashes, and honor to his memory.”

The Hon. R. W. Patterson spoke as follows for the members of the Chi Phi Fraternity residing in Macon:

ADDRESS OF MR. PATTERSON.

Ladies and Gentlemen: When Death like Nature’s chastening rod hath smitten our common humanity, we realize the eternal truth that “silence is the law of being, sound the breaking of the rule.” Standing here as the representative of those who were knit to the distinguished dead by as close a tie as that of natural brotherhood, while a continent is yet vocal with the echoes of his eloquence, my heart tells me that the infinite possibilities of silence constitute the only worthy tribute which I can pay to the 410memory of Henry Grady. The most distinguished member of our fraternity is lost to us forever. O, Death, there is thy sting; O, Grave, there is thy victory. Though our ranks are full of gifted and famous men, in all the tribes of our Israel, there is no Elisha upon whom the mantle of this translated Elijah can descend.

My fellow Georgians, how shall I speak to you of him? It is meet that sympathy should veil her weeping eyes, when she mourns the darling child who bore her gentle image ever mirrored in his life. As well may the tongue speak when the soul has departed, as Southern oratory declaim when Southern eloquence is buried in the grave of Grady. Even American patriotism is voiceless as she stands beside the coffined chieftain of her fast-assembling host. Was he good? Let his neighbors answer. To-night Atlanta is shrouded in as deep a pall as that which wrapped Egypt in gloom when the angel of the Lord smote the first-born in every house. In the busiest city of the State the rattle of commerce to-day was suspended, the hum of industry was hushed, and in that gay capital bright pleasure hath stayed her shining feet to drop a tear upon the grave of him the people loved so well. Was he great? From the pinnacle of no official station has he fallen; the pomp and circumstance of war did not place him upon a pedestal of prominence; no book has he given to the literature of the nation; no wealth has he amassed with which to crystallize his generosity into fame; and yet to-night a continent stands weeping by his new-made grave, and as the waves come laden with the message of the Infinite to the base of the now twice historic Plymouth Rock, the sympathetic sobbing of the sea can only whisper to the stricken land, “Peace, be still; my everlasting arms are round you.”

His greatness cannot be measured by his speeches, though they were so masterful that they form a portion of his country’s history. It will rather be gauged by that patient, brilliant daily work, which made it possible for him to command the nation’s ear, that power of which 411these public utterances were but the exponents; his daily toil in his private sanctum in the stately building of the Constitution, that magnificent manufactory of public thought, which he wielded as a weaver does his shuttle. A small and scantily furnished room, with nothing in it save Grady, his genius and his God,—and yet thus illumined, it warmed with the light of fraternal love both sections of a Republic, compared to which that of historic Greece was but as a perfumed lamp to the noontide splendor of the sun. As a journalist Mr. Grady had no superior in America. As a writer he exercised the princely prerogative of genius which is to create and not obey the laws of rhetoric. As well attempt to teach the nightingale to sing by note, or track the summer lightning as we do the sun, as measure Grady’s style by any rhetorician’s rule. I have thought that Mr. Grady was more of an orator than a writer, and brilliant as his success in journalism was, it was but the moonlight which reflected the sun that dawned only to be obscured by death. Certainly no man in any country or in any age, ever won fame as an orator faster than he. With a wide reputation as a writer, but scarcely any as a speaker, even in his own State, he appeared one night at a banquet in New York, made a speech of twenty minutes, and the next day was known throughout the United States as the foremost of Southern orators. No swifter stride has been made to fame since the days of David, for like that heroic stripling, with the sling of courage and the stone of truth, he slew Sectionalism, the Goliath which had so long threatened and oppressed his people.

Since Appomattox two historic speeches have been made by Southern men; the one was that delivered in the Congress of the United States upon the proposition to strike from the general amnesty of the government the name of Jefferson Davis, when Benjamin H. Hill broke the knightliest lance ever shivered in a people’s honor, full on the haughty crest of the plumed knight; the other was the Boston speech of Mr. Grady which, like a magic key, will 412yet unlock the shackles that have so long manacled a people who, strangest paradox in history, were enslaved by the emancipation of their slaves. The logic of Hill was powerful as the club of Hercules; the eloquence of Grady was irresistible as the lyre of Orpheus.

My countrymen, if it shall be written in the history of America that by virtue of the genius of her Toombs and Cobb and Brown, on the breast of our native State was cradled a revolution which rocked a continent, upon another page of that history it will be recorded that Georgia’s Grady was the Moses who led the Southern people through a wilderness of weakness and of want at least to the Pisgah whence, with prophetic eye, he could discern a New South true to the traditions of the past as was the steel which glittered on the victorious arm, at Manassas, but whose hopeful hearts and helpful hands shall transform desolation into wealth and convert the defeat of one section of our common country into the haughty herald of that country’s future rank in the civilization of the world.

Even, when prompted by the tender relations of the fraternity which I represent, I cannot trust myself to speak of Mr. Grady’s private and social life. He was my friend. Nearly ten years since his kindly glowing words revealed to me an ambition, which I had scarcely dared to confess unto myself. As the summer days still linger with us, so does the daily intercourse which it was my fortune to enjoy with him some three months since—seem yet to “compass me about.” By the royal right of intellect he commanded the homage of my admiration; with the clarion voice of patriotism he challenged my reverence, but with the magnetism of his munificent manhood he bade Confidence, that sentry which guards the human heart, surrender this citadel at discretion. I trust that it will not be deemed inappropriate for me, man of the world as I am, to bear my public testimony to the power of Christianity illustrated in his life. Familiar in his youth with every phase of pleasure, with the affluent blood of early manhood yet running 413riot through his veins, with the temptations of a continent spread like a royal feast, to which his talent and his fame gave him easy access, yet when he bowed his head in reverence to the meek and lowly Nazarene, his life was the unimpeachable witness of his creed. A thousand sermons to me were concentrated in the humanized Christianity of his faith and his works. And God was good to him.—The magnificent success of the Piedmont Exposition was to him the exponent of that industrial progress which he had labored to establish. The bountiful harvest of this closing year had seemed to set the seal of God’s commendation upon his labors for the agricultural interests of the South. Such was his fame that sixty million Americans revered him as a patriot. With a wife beautiful and brilliant, adoring him as only a woman can love a genius whom she comprehends; with two children just verging into adolescence, and reverencing him as an neophyte does his faith; with the highest official station within his grasp; with the curule chair of the Governorship already opening its arms to receive him; with the future lifting the senatorial toga to drape his eloquence; with possibilities of the White House flashing through the green vista of the coming years,—with all of these he made no murmur at the summons of his God.

A widow weeps where yesterday a wife adored. Two orphans mourn to-day where yesterday two children leaned upon a father’s arm. A nation’s hope is turned to mourning. It needed the great heart of Grady to gently murmur, “Thy will, not mine, be done.”

But by all that he has accomplished, and by all that he has projected, which the coming years will yet work out, I tell you to-night, my fellow Georgians, that Henry Grady still lives an abiding influence in the destinies of his country. Greatest enemy of monopoly while he lived, the grandest of all monopolies shall be his after death, for every industrial enterprise hereafter inaugurated in the South must pay its royalty of fame to him. Sleep on, my friend, my brother, brilliant and beloved; let no distempered 414dream of unaccomplished greatness haunt thy long last sleep. The country that you loved, that you redeemed and disenthralled, will be your splendid and ever growing monument, and the blessings of a grateful people will be the grand inscription, which shall grow longer as that monument rises higher among the nations of the earth. Wherever the peach shall blush beneath the kisses of the Southern sun, wherever the affluent grape shall don the royal purple of Southern sovereignty, a votive offering from the one and a rich libation from the other, the grateful husbandman will tender unto you. The music of no machinery shall be heard within this Southland which does not chant a pæan in your praise. Wherever Eloquence, the deity whom this people hath ever worshiped, shall retain a temple, no pilgrim shall enter there, save he bear thy dear name as a sacred shibboleth on his lips. So long as patriotism shall remain the shining angel who guards the destinies of our Republic, her starry finger will point to Grady on Plymouth Rock, for Fame will choose to chisel his statue there, standing as the sentinel whom God had placed to keep eternal watch over the liberties of a re-united people!

The exercises were concluded with the benediction by the Rev. G. A. Nunnally, D.D., President of Mercer University.

MEN of genius often die early. Keats died at twenty-six, Shelly at thirty, Byron at thirty-six, and Burns at thirty-seven. Henry Grady was born May 24th, 1850, and hence was a little more than thirty-nine years of age at his death.

In the opinion of many, no more brilliant man has lived since Byron died. In the power of intense, beautiful and striking expression he has had no equal among us. Had he turned his attention to poetry he would have written something as beautiful as Childe Harold.

Take, for instance, a sentence or two, written eight or ten years ago, in an article from New York to the Constitution, entitled “The Atheistic Tide.” The whole article is exceptionally brilliant. I select at random a paragraph or two:

“We have stripped all the earth of mystery and brought all its phenomena under the square and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the Eternal, and pitch its crucible for an analysis of the Soul. It was natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical Gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine, a vastness and a vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have fathomed its uttermost secret—felt its most hidden pulse, girdled it with steel, harnessed and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery is now demonstration—what was vague is now apparent. Science has dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made plain all 418that was vague on earth and reduced every mystery to demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last, having reduced all the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored every theory to a fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself and warn the world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul. The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a shore that was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its builders, as the shores of a star that lights the spaces beyond our vision are to us to-day. The Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the centuries that look through his dreamy eyes have lost all sense of wonder—ships that were freighted in the heart of Africa lie in our harbors, and our market-places are vocal with more tongues than bewildered the builders of Babel—a letter slips round the earth in ninety days and the messages of men flash along the bed of the ocean—we tell the secrets of the universe as a woman tells her beads, and the stars whirl serenely through orbits that science has defined—we even read of the instant when the comet that plunged in dim illimitable distance, where even the separate stars are lost in mist and vapor, shall whirl again into the vision of man, a wanderer that could not shake off the inexorable supervision of science, even in the chill and measureless depths of the universe.”

This brilliancy, this dazzling, meteoric imagination, made against his reputation in the earlier years of his career. The impression got abroad that he was simply fanciful and superficial—that he could paint his productions in the gorgeous imagery of poetry, but that he had no great intellectual strength and force. It took some time to dispel this illusion. It was only after the great breadth of his mind displayed itself in his powerful speeches in New York, Dallas, Tex., Augusta, Ga., and Boston, that the public began to see that, back behind his rich and brilliant imagination, there was a masterful intellect, able to comprehend the profoundest questions of social and political policy.

419His development as an orator was indeed phenomenal. Nothing has ever been known like it since Sheridan quit play-writing to enter the English House of Commons, and delivered, according to the judgment of Fox and Burke, the most eloquent oration ever spoken to an English auditory. Grady’s whole preparation had been in the line of journalism. He had never practiced at the bar, in the forum, or on the hustings. Yet such was his genius, that, from the very moment he got before the American public, he leaped from the base to the very summit of oratorical fame.

His oratory was sué generis. Like all great men he had no prototype. There was nothing sonorous in his tones of voice—he had nothing of the declamatory pomp of Toombs, the stately periods of Hill, the slow, measured cadences of Stephens. Like Mark Antony he talked along; but such talk—as sweet as the harp of Orpheus whose melody swayed the trees of the forest and rent asunder the solid rocks. Like a fountain unsealed, his thought flowed forth in gushing opulence, and in every rhythmic period his soul voiced itself in perfect music. He could awake all the sleeping passions of the heart and set them astir with his own enthusiasm. Like a pendulum, he swung betwixt a smile and a tear, now convulsing all with his humor and anon melting all with his pathos.

Added to such brilliant gifts as a writer and a speaker, he had the genius of common sense. He could project a movement of great practical interest, and perfect and accomplish it with the same marvellous facility that he could indite a morning editorial. He saw in our uncut quarries the marble halls and palaces of the rich—in our mountains of ore the matchless steam engines and their tracks of steel along which our growing commerce was to be borne to the distant marts of the world—in our waving forests of pine, the cities of majestic splendor and beauty that were to adorn and enrich our vast domain. As Webster said of Hamilton, in reference to the public credit, he touched the dead corpse of our industries and they arose and stood upon their feet.

420To all these gifts of head, there was an added heart of boundless sympathies. In his writings there is always an undertone of sentiment, bespeaking a moral nature as opulent as was his intellectual endowment. His imagination caught up the good, the beautiful and the true. With the alchemy of his genius he could transmute the simplest flower into a preacher of righteousness, and get from it some lessons of wisdom and truth. To lift up and crown humanity was the supremest aspiration of his life. This ruling passion was strong in death, and even in the delirium preceding dissolution, his brain was rife with its own desiring phantasies, and he died in the midst of dreams born of yearnings to help and bless the needy and the heavy laden.

Perhaps no one has lived among us who possessed more of the elements which go to make up the hero, the popular idol. Noble in presence, gracious in manner, gentle in spirit, manly in everything, he commanded not only the admiration but the love of all. If all who tenderly loved him could lay a garland upon his grave his ashes would rest beneath a mountain of flowers.

To die so wept and mourned were more to be desired than the glittering honors of splendid obsequies. To live, as he will live, embalmed in the immortality of love, is better far than enshrinement in the cold emblazonry of marble.

Loving hands and hearts will erect to his memory the granite shaft, cut and chiselled with words of eulogy, but his most enduring monument is his grand, historic life, standing out imperishably based upon the affections and the love of a grateful people, and pointing unborn generations to the same heights of purity and honor he so worthily attained.

HISTORY repeats itself, and genius does the same. The light which shines with electric brilliancy in one portion of a country, though suddenly extinguished, soon blazes forth with life and hope, in genial air and under propitious skies.

Eminent in illustration of this truth, is the very great similarity in the mental structure, the physical temperament and the personal qualities of Seargent S. Prentiss and Henry W. Grady. The first was born in bleak and sterile Maine, and yet his great heart was not hemmed in by the hills around which clung the memories of his Pilgrim fathers. It took within its spacious chambers, and nurtured in patriotic affection the new-found friends of his adopted home, in the semi-tropical valleys of the lower Mississippi. The other was born on Georgia soil, and Southern traditions, memories and methods of thought seemed but a second nature with him. It did not prevent his fullness to the brim with that Promethean flame and “milk of human kindness,” which caused him in boundless Americanism, to wear a constant smile, born of infinite hope and faith in the future of a great Republic, stretching from the rugged coast of Maine to the broad plazas of Texas—from the noble forests of Oregon to the coral reefs of Florida.

Each of these men combined with deep research and intuitive perception, an imagination as luxuriant as a tropical garden, and while each put forth “thoughts that breathed in words that burned,” he was ever careful in the exercise of his great gifts, that they should always be 422directed in the promotion of human happiness, and to stimulate the loftiest human exertion. When Prentiss or Grady spoke every listener felt the touch of the master hand as it played upon his heart-strings—felt the tingling of the blood in his fingers’ ends, and could not fail to enjoy the delightful silence of universal and spontaneous admiration. The eloquence of these two men was not of that school which deals in thundergusts of word-painting, devoid of reason, sense, or consistency. Their ideas are always comely, well-proportioned, clear in outline and yet not angular in structure. They spoke for God and humanity—for liberty—for love—for law. They did not pervert their great gifts from the purposes that Nature intended. They used their magic power to smooth and soften the rough, hard places of human life, to promote all ends and objects catholic, worthy, commendable—to charm and persuade the morose and unwilling—to denounce like Nathan—to warn like Cassandra—to encourage like an angel of light. When either of them spoke, he seemed to realize the sublimest purpose of his mission; and condensed his giant electric power, as the heat charges the summer cloud with the bolts that are soon to flash and shiver.

Prentiss died in the same year that Grady was born; and when he first closed his brilliant career at forty-two years of age, the second was but a smiling infant six weeks old. Each, cut off before he had reached the zenith, was

The glorious sun of each “went down while it was yet day.”

Some extracts are here given, from an address delivered by Prentiss before the New England Society of New Orleans, on December 22, 1845. These will be followed by some from Grady’s Boston speech. Prentiss at the time named, was about the same age that Grady was when he died. In opening Prentiss said: “This is a day dear to the sons of New England, and ever held by them in sacred remembrance. On this day, from every quarter of the globe, they 423gather in spirit around the Rock of Plymouth, and hang upon the urn of their Pilgrim fathers, the garlands of filial gratitude and affection. We have assembled for the purpose of participating in this honorable duty—of performing this pious pilgrimage. To-day we will visit that memorable spot. We gaze upon the place where a feeble band of persecuted exiles founded a mighty nation; and our hearts will exult with proud gratification, as we remember that on that barren shore our ancestors planted not only empire, but freedom.

“Of the future but little is known; clouds and darkness rest upon it. We yearn to become acquainted with its hidden secrets—we stretch out our arms toward its shadowy inhabitants—we invoke our posterity, but they answer us not. We turn for relief to the past, that mighty reservoir of men and things. There we are introduced into Nature’s vast laboratory, and witness her elemental labors. We mark with interest the changes in continents and oceans, by which she has notched the centuries. With curious wonder we gaze down the long aisles of the past, upon the generations that are gone. We behold as in a magic glass, men in form and feature like ourselves, actuated by the same motives, urged by the same passions, busily engaged in shaping out both their own destinies and ours. We approach them, and they refuse not our invocation. We hold converse with the wise philosophers, the sage legislators, and divine poets. But most of all among the innumerable multitudes that peopled the past, we seek our own ancestors, drawn toward them by an irresistible sympathy. With reverent solicitude we examine into their character and actions, and as we find them worthy or unworthy, our hearts swell with pride or our cheeks glow with shame.”

Speaking of the simplicity of the Pilgrim habits, Prentiss goes on: “In founding their colony they sought neither wealth nor conquest; but only peace and freedom. From the moment they touched the shore, they labored with orderly, systematic and persevering industry. They cultivated, 424without a murmur, a poor and ungrateful soil, which even now yields but a stubborn obedience to the dominion of the plow. They brought with them neither wealth nor power, but the principles of civil and religious freedom. They cherished, cultivated and developed them to a full and luxuriant maturity; and furnished them to their posterity as the only sure and permanent foundations for free government. We are proud of our native land, and turn with fond affection to its rocky shores. Behold the thousand temples of the Most High, that nestle in its happy valleys and crown its swelling hills. See how their glittering spires pierce the sky—celestial conductors ready to avert the lightning of an angry heaven!”

Himself the son of a ship-builder, he thus speaks of the enterprise of the Pilgrims: “They have wrestled with Nature, till they have prevailed against her, and compelled her reluctantly to reverse her own laws. The sterile soil has become productive under their sagacious culture, and the barren rock, astonished, finds itself covered with luxuriant and unaccustomed verdure. Upon the banks of every river they build temples of industry, and stop the squanderings of the spendthrift waters. They bind the Naiades of the brawling stream; they drive the Dryades from their accustomed haunts, and force them to desert each favorite grove: for from river, creek, and bay they are busy transforming the crude forests into staunch and gallant vessels. From every inlet and indenture along the rocky shore, swim forth these ocean-birds—born in the wildwood—fledged upon the wave. Behold how they spread their white pinions to the favoring breeze, and wing their flight to every quarter of the globe—the carrier pigeons of the world!”

But lastly how brimming with pathos, how pregnant with patriotic ardor, is the following: “Glorious New England! Thou art still true to thy ancient fame, and worthy of thy ancestral honors. We thy children have assembled in this far-distant land to celebrate thy birthday. A thousand fond associations throng upon us, roused 425by the spirit of the hour. On thy pleasant valleys rest, like sweet dews of the morning, the gentle recollections of our early life; around thy hills and mountains cling like gathering mists the mighty memories of the Revolution; and far away on the horizon of the past, gleam like thine own Northern lights, the awful virtues of our Pilgrim sires. But while we devote this day to the remembrance of our native land, we forget not that in which our happy lot is cast. We exult in the reflection that, though we count by thousands the miles which separate us from our birthplace, still our country is the same. We have but changed our chamber in the paternal mansion; in all its rooms we are at home, and all who inhabit it are our brothers. We are no exiles meeting upon the banks of a foreign river, to swell its waters with our home-sick tears. Here floats the same banner which nestled above our boyish heads, except that its mighty folds are wider, and its glittering stars increased in number.”

The sound of this eloquent tongue was stilled, but the “divine afflatus” with which it was tuned was transferred to, and continued in another. Near the birthplace of the noble Prentiss, and surrounded by those who were proud of his fame, Grady referred to those surroundings and the objects of his visit, when he said: “Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New England’s historic soil, and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and her thrift. Here within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill—where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought, and Channing preached—here in the cradle of American letters, and almost of American liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New England, when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange apparition! This stern and unique figure, carved from the ocean and the wilderness, its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winters and of wars,—until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base,—while startled kings and emperors gazed 426and marveled that from the rude touch of this handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied genius of human government, and the perfected model of human liberty! God bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of their living sons, and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.”

Faithful to the memories of his childhood, and to the devotion of his mature years, visions of his distant home rise to his mental eye, and with a master’s magic touch he spreads the picture on the glowing canvas: “Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There is centered all that can please or prosper human kind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil, yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night, the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains.”

In speaking of southern citizenship, and the perils of its present environment, Grady says: “The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South, the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history—whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war—whose energy has made bricks without straw, and spread splendor amidst the ashes of their war-wasted homes—these men wear this problem in their hearts and their brains, by day and by night. They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means, what they owe to this kindly and dependent race, the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march encumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed 427to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!”

The conclusion of that grand address, so powerful in scope and faultless in diction, is a forcible reminder of Webster’s great peroration in his reply to Hayne on Foot’s Resolution. Grady here says: “A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever divides. We, sir, are Americans, and we fight for human liberty. The uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth. France, Brazil—these are our victories. To redeem the earth from kingcraft and oppression, this is our mission. And we shall not fail. God has sown in our soil the seed of his millennial harvest, and he will not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until his full and perfect day has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, all the way, aye, even from the hour when, from the voiceless and trackless ocean, a new world rose to the sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that stupendous day—when the old world will come to marvel and to learn, amid our gathered treasures—let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past with the spectacle of a Republic compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love—loving from the Lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill, serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory, blazing out the path and making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in God’s appointed time!”

The love and respect of the Mississippians and Louisianans, and of the entire Southwest for Prentiss was only equaled by the admiration of the North for Grady. All honor to their memories, and peace to their patriot shades! The “clods of the valley will be sweet unto them” until the resurrection morn.

Columbus, Ga., Feb. 5, 1890.

THE great Academy of Music, Brooklyn, N.Y., was crowded to-day, February 23, as it never had been before. Prominent in the congregation were most of the gentlemen who had attended the banquet of the Southern Society. Their presence was due to the intimation that Dr. Talmage was going to preach on the life and character of the Constitution’s late editor, Mr. Henry W. Grady. Dr. Talmage was at his best, in splendid voice, and his rounded periods made a deep impression upon all present. Taking for his text Isaiah viii., 1, “Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen,” the preacher said:

To Isaiah, with royal blood in his veins and a habitant of palaces, does this divine order come. He is to take a roll, a large roll, and write on it with a pen, not an angel’s pen, but a man’s pen. So God honored the pen and so he honored the manuscript. In our day the mightiest roll is the religious and secular newspaper, and the mightiest pen is the editor’s pen, whether for good or evil. And God says now to every literary man, and especially to every journalist: “Take thee a great roll and write in it with a man’s pen.”

THE NEWS ON THE MEDITERRANEAN.

Within a few weeks one of the strongest, most vivid and most brilliant of those pens was laid down on the editorial desk in Atlanta, never again to be resumed. I was far away at the time. We had been sailing up from the Mediterranean Sea, through the Dardanelles, which region is unlike anything I ever saw for beauty. There is not any other water scenery on earth where God has done so many picturesque things with islands. They are somewhat like the Thousand Islands of our American St. Lawrence, but 429more like heaven. Indeed, we had just passed Patmos, the place from which John had his apocalyptic vision. Constantinople had seemed to come out to greet us, for your approach to that city is different from any other city. Other cities as you approach them seem to retire, but this city, with its glittering minarets and pinnacles, seems almost to step into the water to greet you. But my landing there, that would have been to me an exhilaration, was suddenly stunned with the tidings of the death of my intimate friend, Henry W. Grady. I could hardly believe the tidings, for I had left on my study table at home letters and telegrams from him, those letters and telegrams having a warmth and geniality, and a wit such as he alone could express. The departure of no public man for many years has so affected me. For days I walked about as in a dream, and I resolved that, getting home, I would, for the sake of his bereaved household, and for the sake of his bereaved profession, and for the sake of what he had been to me, and shall continue to be as long as memory lasts, I would speak a word in appreciation of him, the most promising of Americans, and learn some of the salient lessons of his departure.

I have no doubt that he had enemies, for no man can live such an active life as he lived, or be so far in advance of his time without making enemies, some because he defeated their projects, and some because he outshone them. Owls and bats never did like the rising sun. But I shall tell you how he appeared to me, and I am glad that I told him while he was in full health what I thought of him. Memorial orations and gravestone epitaphs are often mean enough, for they say of a man after he is dead that which ought to have been said of him while living. One garland for a living brow is worth more than a mountain of japonicas and calla lilies heaped on a funeral casket. By a little black volume of fifty pages, containing the eulogiums and poems uttered and written at the demise of Clay and Webster and Calhoun and Lincoln and Sumner, the world tried to pay for the forty years of obloquy it heaped upon 430those living giants. If I say nothing in praise of a man while he lives I will keep silent when he is dead. Myrtle and weeping willow can never do what ought to have been done by amaranth and palm branch. No amount of “Dead March in Saul” rumbling from big organs at the obsequies can atone for non-appreciation of the man before he fell on sleep. The hearse cannot do what ought to have been done by chariot. But there are important things that need to be said about our friend, who was a prophet in American journalism, and who only a few years ago heard the command of my text: “Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen.”

A RETROSPECT OF LIFE.

His father dead, Henry W. Grady, a boy fourteen years of age, took up the battle of life. It would require a long chapter to record the names of orphans who have come to the top. When God takes away the head of the household He very often gives to some lad in that household a special qualification. Christ remembers how that His own father died early, leaving Him to support Himself and His mother and His brothers in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth, and He is in sympathy with all boys and all young men in the struggle. You say: “Oh, if my father had only lived I would have had a better education and I would have had a more promising start, and there are some wrinkles on my brow that would not have been there.” But I have noticed that God makes a special way for orphans. You would not have been half the man you are if you had not been obliged from your early days to fight your own battles. What other boys got out of Yale and Harvard you got in the university of hard knocks. Go among successful merchants, lawyers, physicians and men of all occupations and professions, and there are many of them who will tell you: “At ten, or twelve, or fifteen years of age, I started for myself; father was sick, or father was dead.” But somehow they got through and got up. I account for it by the fact that there is a special dispensation of God 431for orphans. All hail, the fatherless and motherless! The Lord Almighty will see you through. Early obstacles for Mr. Grady were only the means for development of his intellect and heart. And lo! when at thirty-nine years of age he put down his pen and closed his lips for the perpetual silence, he had done a work which many a man who lives on to sixty and seventy and eighty years never accomplishes. There is a great deal of senseless praise of longevity, as though it were a wonderful achievement to live a good while. Ah, my friends, it is not how long we live, but how well we live and how usefully we live. A man who lives to eighty years and accomplishes nothing for God or humanity might better have never lived at all. Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and what did it amount to? In all those more than nine centuries he did not accomplish anything which seemed worth record. Paul lived only a little more than sixty, but how many Methuselahs would it take to make one Paul? Who would not rather have Paul’s sixty years than Methuselah’s nine hundred and sixty-nine? Robert McCheyne died at thirty years of age and John Summerfield at twenty-seven years of age, but neither earth nor heaven will ever hear the end of their usefulness. Longevity! Why, an elephant can beat you at that, for it lives a hundred and fifty and two hundred years. Gray hairs are the blossoms of the tree of life if found in the way of righteousness, but the frosts of the second death if found in the way of sin.

MR. GRADY AS A CHRISTIAN.

One of our able New York journals last spring printed a question and sent it to many people, and, among others, to myself: “Can the editor of a secular journal be a Christian?” Some of the newspapers answered no. I answered yes; and, lest you may not understand me, I say yes again. Summer before last, riding with Mr. Grady from a religious meeting in Georgia on Sunday night, he said to me some things which I now reveal for the first time, because it is appropriate now that I reveal them. 432He expressed his complete faith in the gospel, and expressed his astonishment and his grief that in our day so many young men were rejecting Christianity. From the earnestness and the tenderness and the confidence with which he spoke on these things I concluded that when Henry W. Grady made public profession of his faith in Christ, and took his place at the holy communion in the Methodist Church, he was honestly and truly Christian. That conversation that Sunday night, first in the carriage and then resumed in the hotel, impressed me in such a way that when I simply heard of his departure, without any of the particulars, I concluded that he was ready to go. I warrant there was no fright in the last exigency, but that he found what is commonly called “the last enemy” a good friend, and from his home on earth he went to a home in heaven. Yes, Mr. Grady not only demonstrated that an editor may be a Christian, but that a very great intellect may be gospelized. His mental capacity was so wonderful it was almost startling. I have been with him in active conversation while at the same time he was dictating to a stenographer editorials for the Atlanta Constitution. But that intellect was not ashamed to bow to Christ. Among his last dying utterances was a request for the prayers of the churches in his behalf.

There was that particular quality in him that you do not find in more than one person out of hundreds of thousands—namely, personal magnetism. People have tried to define that quality, and always failed, yet we have all felt its power. There are some persons who have only to enter a room or step upon a platform or into a pulpit, and you are thrilled by their presence, and when they speak your nature responds and you cannot help it. What is the peculiar influence with which such a magnetic person takes hold of social groups and audiences? Without attempting to define this, which is indefinable, I will say it seems to correspond to the waves of air set in motion by the voice or the movements of the body. Just like that atmospheric vibration is the moral or spiritual vibration which rolls out from the soul of what we 433call a magnetic person. As there may be a cord or rope binding bodies together, there may be an invisible cord binding souls. A magnetic man throws it over others as a hunter throws a lasso. Mr. Grady was surcharged with this influence, and it was employed for patriotism and Christianity and elevated purposes.

GREAT MEN MAY BE CHRISTIANS.

You may not know why, in the conversation which I had with Mr. Gladstone a few weeks ago, he uttered these memorable words about Christianity, some of which were cabled to America. He was speaking in reply to this remark: I said: “Mr. Gladstone, we are told in America by some people that Christianity does very well for weak-minded men and children in the infant class, but it is not fit for stronger minded men; but when we mention you, of such large intellectuality, as being a pronounced friend of religion, we silence their batteries.” Then Mr. Gladstone stopped on the hillside where we were exercising, and said: “The older I grow, the more confirmed I am in my faith in religion.” “Sir,” said he, with flashing eye and uplifted hand, “talk about the questions of the day, there is but one question, and that is the Gospel. That can and will correct everything. Do you have any of that dreadful agnosticism in America?” Having told him we had, he went on to say: “I am profoundly thankful that none of my children or kindred have been blasted by it. I am glad to say that about all the men at the top in Great Britain are Christians. Why, sir,” he said, “I have been in public position fifty-eight years, and forty-seven years in the cabinet of the British government, and during those forty-seven years I have been associated with sixty of the master minds of the century, and all but five of the sixty were Christians.” He then named the four leading physicians and surgeons of his country, calling them by name and remarking upon the high qualities of each of them and added: “They are all thoroughly Christian.” My friends, I think it will be quite respectable for a little longer to be 434the friends of religion. William E. Gladstone, a Christian; Henry W. Grady, a Christian. What the greatest of Englishmen said of England is true of America and of all Christendom. The men at the top are the friends of God and believers in the sanctities of religion, the most eminent of the doctors, the most eminent of the lawyers, the most eminent of the merchants, and there are no better men in all our land than some of those who sit in editorial chairs. And if that does not correspond with your acquaintanceship, I am sorry that you have fallen into bad company. In answer to the question put last spring, “Can a secular journalist be a Christian?” I not only answer in the affirmative, but I assert that so great are the responsibilities of that profession, so infinite and eternal the consequences of their obedience or disobedience of the words of my text, “Take thee a great roll and write in it with a man’s pen,” and so many are the surrounding temptations, that the men of no other profession more deeply need the defenses and the reinforcements of the grace of God.

THE OPPORTUNITIES OF JOURNALISM.

And then look at the opportunities of journalism. I praise the pulpit and magnify my office, but I state a fact which you all know when I say that where the pulpit touches one person the press touches five hundred. The vast majority of people do not go to church, but all intelligent people read the newspapers. While, therefore, the responsibility of the minister is great, the responsibilities of editors and reporters is greater. Come, brother journalist, and get your ordination, not by the laying on of human hands, but by the laying on of the hands of the Almighty. To you is committed the precious reputation of men and the more precious reputation of women. Spread before our children an elevated literature. Make sin appear disgusting and virtue admirable. Believe good rather than evil. While you show up the hypocrisies of the church, show up the stupendous hypocrisies outside of the church. Be not, as some of you are, 435the mere echoes of public opinion; make public opinion. Let the great roll on which you write with a man’s pen be a message of light and liberty, and kindness and an awakening of moral power. But who is sufficient for these things! Not one of you without Divine help. But get that influence and the editors and reporters can go up and take this world for God and the truth. The mightiest opportunity in all the world for usefulness to-day is open before editors and reporters and publishers, whether of knowledge on foot, as in the book, or knowledge on the wing, as in the newspaper; I pray God, men of the newspaper press, whether you hear or read this sermon, that you may rise up to your full opportunity and that you may be divinely helped and rescued and blessed.

Some one might say to me: “How can you talk thus of the newspaper press when you yourself have sometimes been unfairly treated and misrepresented?” I answer that in the opportunity the newspaper press of this country and other countries have given me week by week to preach the gospel to the nations, I am put under so much obligation that I defy all editors and reporters, the world over, to write anything that shall call forth from me one word of bitter retort from now till the day of my death. My opinion is that all reformers and religious teachers, instead of spending so much time and energy in denouncing the press, had better spend more time in thanking them for what they have done for the world’s intelligence, and declaring their magnificent opportunity and urging their employment of it all for beneficent and righteous purposes.

A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM.

Again, I remark that Henry W. Grady stood for Christian patriotism irrespective of political spoils. He declined all official reward. He could have been Governor of Georgia, but refused it. He could have been Senator of the United States, but declined it. He remained plain Henry Grady. Nearly all the other orators of the political arena, as soon as the elections are over, go to 436Washington, or Albany, or Harrisburg, or Atlanta, to get in city or state or national office, reward for their services, and not getting what they want spend the rest of the time of that administration in pouting about the management of public affairs or cursing Harrison or Cleveland. When the great political campaigns were over Mr. Grady went home to his newspaper. He demonstrated that it is possible to toil for principles which he thought to be right, simply because they were right. Christian patriotism is too rare a commodity in this country. Surely the joy of living under such free institutions as those established here ought to be enough reward for political fidelity. Among all the great writers that stood at the last Presidential election on Democratic and Republican platforms, you cannot recall in your mind ten who were not themselves looking for remunerative appointments. Aye, you can count them all on the fingers of one hand. The most illustrious specimen of that style of man for the last ten years was Henry W. Grady.

Again, Mr. Grady stood for the New South, and was just what we want to meet three other men, one to speak for the New North, another for the New East, and another for the New West. The bravest speech made for the last quarter of a century was that made by Mr. Grady at the New England dinner in New York about two or three years ago. I sat with him that evening and know something of his anxieties, for he was to tread on dangerous ground, and might by one misspoken word have antagonized both sections. His speech was a victory that thrilled all of us who heard him and all who read him. That speech, great for wisdom, great for kindness, great for pacification, great for bravery, will go down to the generations with Webster’s speech at Bunker Hill, William Wirt’s speech at the arraignment of Aaron Burr, Edmund Burke’s speech on Warren Hastings, Robert Emmett’s speech for his own vindication.

Who will in conspicuous action represent the New North as he did the New South? Who will come forth 437for the New East and who for the New West? Let old political issues be buried, let old grudges die. Let new theories be launched. With the coming in of a new nation at the gates of Castle Garden every year, and the wheat bin and corn crib of our land enlarged with every harvest, and a vast multitude of our population still plunged in illiteracy to be educated, and moral questions abroad involving the very existence of our Republic, let the old political platforms that are worm-eaten be dropped, and platforms that shall be made of two planks, the one the Ten Commandments, and the other the Sermon on the Mount, lifted for all of us to stand on. But there is a lot of old politicians grumbling all around the sky who don’t want a New South, a New North, a New East, or a New West. They have some old war speeches that they prepared in 1861, that in all our autumnal elections they feel called upon to inflict upon the country. They growl louder and louder in proportion as they are pushed back further and further and the Henry W. Gradys come to the front. But the mandate, I think, has gone forth from the throne of God that a new American Nation shall take the place of the old, and the new has been baptized for God and liberty, and justice and peace and morality and religion.

THE APOTHEOSIS.

And now our much lamented friend has gone to give account. Suddenly the facile and potent pen is laid down and the eloquent tongue is silent. What? Is there no safeguard against fatal disease? The impersonation of stout health was Mr. Grady. What compactness of muscle! What ruddy complexion! What flashing eye! Standing with him in a group of twenty or thirty persons at Piedmont, he looked the healthiest, as his spirits were the blithest. Shall we never feel again the hearty grasp of his hand or be magnetized with his eloquence? Men of the great roll, men of the pen, men of wit, men of power, if our friend had to go when the call came, so must you when your call comes. When God asks you what have 438you done with your pen, or your eloquence, or your wealth, or your social position, will you be able to give satisfactory answer? What have we been writing all these years? If mirth, has it been innocent mirth, or that which tears and stings and lacerates? From our pen have there come forth productions healthy or poisonous! In the last great day, when the warrior must give account of what he has done with his sword, and the merchant what he has done with his yard stick, and the mason what he has done with his trowel, and the artist what he has done with his pencil, we shall have to give account of what we have done with our pen. There are gold pens and diamond pens, and pens of exquisite manufacture, and every few weeks I see some new kind of pen, each said to be better than the other; but in the great day of our arraignment before the Judge of the quick and dead, that will be the most beautiful pen, whether gold or steel or quill, which never wrote a profane or unclean or cruel word, or which from the day it was carved or split at the nib, dropped from its point kindness and encouragement, and help and gratitude to God and benediction for man.

May God comfort that torn up Southern home, and all the homes of this country, and of all the world, which have been swept by this plague of influenza, which has deepened sometimes into pneumonia and sometimes into typhus, and the victims of which are counted by the ten thousand, Satan, who is the “prince of the power of the air,” has been poisoning the atmosphere in all nations. Though it is the first time in our remembrance, he has done the same thing before. In 1696 the unwholesome air of Cairo, Egypt, destroyed the life of ten thousand in one day, and in Constantinople in 1714 three hundred thousand people died of it. I am glad that by the better sanitation of our cities and wider understanding of hygienic laws and the greater skill of physicians these Apollyonic assaults upon the human race are being resisted, but pestilential atmosphere is still abroad. Hardly a family here but has felt its lighter or heavier touch. Some of the best of my flock fell under its 439power and many homes here represented have been crushed. The fact is the biggest failure in the universe is this world, if there be no heaven beyond. But there is, and the friends who have gone there are many, and very dear. Oh, tearful eyes, look up to the hills crimsoning with eternal morn! That reunion kiss will more than make up for the parting kiss, and the welcome will obliterate the good-by. “The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” Till then, O departed loved ones, promise us that you will remember us, as we promise to remember you. And some of you gone up from this city by the sea, and others from under southern skies and others from the homes of the more rigorous North and some from the cabins on great western farms, we shall meet again when our pen has written its last word and our arm has done its last day’s work and our lips have spoken their last adieu.

And now, thou great and magnificent soul of editor and orator! under brighter skies we shall meet again. From God thou camest, and to God thou hast returned. Not broken down, but ascended. Not collapsed, but irradiated. Enthroned one! Coroneted one! Sceptered one! Emparadised one! Hail and farewell!

AS the soldier falls upon the battle-field in the line of duty, so died Henry Woodfin Grady, the progressive editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Mr. Grady came to the North twelve days ago, with his fatal illness upon him, against the entreaties of his family, to speak a word for the South, to the mind and conscience of New England. He performed his task in splendid spirit, and with the effective and moving eloquence that were always his, and then returned home to die. It is highly probable that if he had not gone to Boston he would be living and writing to-day. It is as more than a journalist or an orator, that Mr. Grady is to be counted. He was admirable as both, but he was more than a Southerner, a peacemaker between the sections. He was intensely Southern, filled full of all the traditions of his people, proud of them and their past, but he accepted the new order with the magnificent enthusiasm of his intense nature, and became the embodiment of the spirit of the New South. More than any other man of this section, he had the ear of the people of the North. They believed the patriotic assurances which he made in behalf of his people, because they knew him to be honest and sincere and thoroughly devoted to all that makes for the best in public affairs. His influence in Atlanta and throughout the South was deservedly great. No Southerner could have been so ill-spared as this young man, whose future only a day or two ago seemed brilliant to a degree. His death is a wonderfully great bereavement, and not only to his family and the community in which he lived and labored, but the whole country, whose peace and unity and kindly sentiment he did so much to promote.

Mr. Grady’s death will be deeply and justly regretted all over the country. He had, though still a young man, made for himself a national reputation, and by his steadfast counsels for peace and good will, and by his intelligent devotion to the development of his State and of the South, had won the good will of North and South alike.

It is seldom that so good a journalist is at the same time so brilliant and effective an orator as Mr. Grady was. The reason probably is that when he spoke he had something to say, and that he was of so cheerful and hopeful a spirit that he was able to affect his hearers with his own optimism. In that he was a thorough American, for, as one of the shrewdest New Yorkers once said, “This is a bull country, and the bears have the wrong philosophy for the American people.”

For that training which made him not only a brilliant and successful, but, what is better, a broadly intelligent and useful journalist, the Herald claims a not inconsiderable share of credit, which Mr. Grady himself was accustomed to give it. The Herald was his early and best school. As a correspondent of this journal he first made his mark by the fearless accuracy of his reports of some exciting scenes in the reconstruction period. He showed in those days so keen an eye as an observer, united with such rapid and just judgment of the bearings of facts, that his reports in the Herald attracted general attention and were recognized freely, even by those whom they inconvenienced, as the clearest, the most truthful, and the most just reports 445made of those events. He was then still a very young man; but he quickly saw that the province of a newspaper, and of a reporter of events for it, is to tell the exact truth, to tell it simply and straightforwardly, and without fear, favor or prejudice. This is what he learned from his connection with the Herald, and this lesson he carried into his own able journal, the Atlanta Constitution.

It does not often happen that so young a man as Mr. Grady was makes so great and widespread a reputation, and this without any of the tricks of self-puffery which are the cheap resort of too many young men ambitious of fame, or what they mistake for fame—notoriety.

In Mr. Grady’s untimely death the country loses one of its foremost and most clear-headed journalists, and his State one of its most eminent and justly admired citizens.

A LOSS TO THE WHOLE COUNTRY.

The death of Henry Grady is a loss to the whole country, but there is some consolation in the general recognition of this fact. During his brief career as a public man he has said many things that it was profitable for both North and South to hear, and he has said them in such a way as to enhance their significance. As editor of one of the few widely influential papers of the South, he possessed an opportunity, which he had also in great measure created, of impressing his opinions upon Southern society, but it was to a few occasional addresses in Northern cities that he chiefly owed his national reputation. His rhetorical gifts were not of the highest order, but he had command of a style of speaking which was most effective for his purposes. It was marked by the Celtic characteristic of exuberance, but it was so agreeable and inspiring that he was able to 446command at will audiences at home and abroad. When so endowed he has also a significant message to deliver, and is, moreover, animated by a sincere desire to serve his generation to the full measure of his ability, the loss which his death inflicts is not easily repaired. The whole country will unite in deploring the sudden extinction of a faithful life. Mr. Grady’s zeal, activity and patriotism were fully recognized in the North, as we have said, but yet it was pre-eminently to his own people that he was an example and inspiration. His loyalty to the cause in which his father fell was untinged with bitterness, and he never permitted himself to imagine that vain regrets were more sacred than present obligations. He was an admirable illustration of that sagacious and progressive spirit which is gradually, but surely, renewing the South, and which, though it still lacks something of being altogether equal to its opportunities, does nevertheless recognize the fact that “new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth.”

WHAT HENRY W. GRADY REPRESENTED.

What undoubtedly interested and fascinated people most in the late Henry W. Grady was the fact that he represented an order of genius now almost extinct in our country, and yet one in which some of the favorite episodes of its history are entwined. The orator who appealed at once to the reason and the feelings was beyond question the foremost power of our early national century of history. He was not predominant in the councils which founded our government, nor in the first decade of its administration; because the duties of that period called for the calm deliberations of statesmen rather than the arousing of voters to action. As this era of national infancy drew to its close, 447and the gigantic problems, destined at a later day to involve the nation in civil war, came forth into sudden prominence, the orator became the central figure of the national stage. The rank and file gave their allegiance to their chosen oratorical leader. He spoke in their behalf in Congress; he defined in all political gatherings the will and purposes of his constituents; and not less powerfully was his influence exerted to shape those opinions and purposes. Indeed, the speeches of Clay, Calhoun and Webster, and at a later day of Douglas and Lincoln, are better understood when regarded as shaping public opinion than as following the popular will already formed. The speeches of these leaders supplied the need which is now met by the newspaper editorial in journals of influence and public spirit. Like the newspaper of this later day, the American orator of half a century ago was quick to note a change in the trend of public sentiment, and at his best fearless in leading the movement even before the popular mind had given assent.

The civil war brought to a close the epoch in which flourished this interesting and impressive figure of our earlier politics. To-day, partly because of the greater diffusion of news and intelligence, partly by reason of the more technical and analytical character of the national problems which confront us, he has quite disappeared from the political stage. One need only recall the congressional or campaign speeches of our ablest public speakers to appreciate the truth of this. It was Mr. Grady’s good fortune that he, equipped with the keen insight and fervid eloquence of our old public leaders, was placed in an epoch and a community where the reconciling of the North and the South called for just these powers. Presently, when the wave of closer commercial intercourse and the better mutual understanding shall have swept with unprecedented rapidity over the whole nation, the feelings which made such mediation necessary will be quite dead. But the work of the men who led the way is not likely to be forgotten.

The death of Henry W. Grady is a very much greater national loss than the public will at first concede; and while his death will be regretted, not only by the Democracy of the country, but by all patriotic citizens, few will recognize that he was one of the few prominent young men, who were children during the War, who labored to obliterate absolutely the animosity it engendered. We believe that if the circumstance of his prominent position had not silenced Jefferson Davis, who died almost simultaneously with this youth, he, too, would have been found advocating the truth that the Union of these States is homogeneous, and that Union is worth all the sacrifices it cost.

The young Atlanta editor has, during the past few years, done as much as any other public man toward the accomplishment of perfect reunion and for the prosperity of his State and section. His later addresses had been specially characterized by a broad grasp of political and industrial problems that entitled him to high rank as an accomplished and far-sighted statesman.

There have been few more interesting personalities in the life of the country in the past decade, and there was no man of his years with brighter prospects than Grady at the time of his last visit to the North, which will be memorable as the occasion of his most comprehensive and effective address on his constant theme of American prosperity through fraternity.

AN APOSTLE OF THE NEW FAITH.

Few men who have never entered the public service were more widely known throughout the country than Henry W. Grady, who died at Atlanta, and the death of only 449a few even of those who have won the honors and the prominence of public life would be more sincerely deplored. Ten years ago Mr. Grady had made himself known in the South by the fervency of his devotion to her interests and by the unusual ability he displayed in his newspaper work, and the people of the South met his devotion with characteristic warmth of affection and generosity of praise. A little later he was recognized in the North as an eloquent interpreter of the new spirit which had awakened and possessed the South. His speech at the dinner of the New England Society three years ago was only an expression from a more conspicuous platform of the sentiments which had long inspired his daily writing. And it was not merely as an interpreter of Southern feeling that Mr. Grady was entitled to recognition. In a large measure he was the creator of the spirit that now animates the South. He was an apostle of the new faith. He exhorted the people of the Southern States to concern themselves no longer about what they had lost, but to busy themselves with what they might find to do, to consecrate the memories of the war if they would, but to put the whole strength of their minds and bodies into the building up of the New South. To his teaching and his example, as much as to any other single influence perhaps, the South owes the impulses of material advancement, of downright hard work, and that well-nigh complete reconciliation to the conditions and duties of the present and the future that distinguish her to-day.

THE FOREMOST LEADER.

The death of Henry W. Grady, at Atlanta, on Monday of this week, was a loss, not only to his own section, but to the country. Although a young man, and not in political life, Mr. Grady had already acquired a national reputation. It is only three years since he delivered the speech at the New England dinner in this city, which gave a sudden 450expansion to a reputation already rapidly extending, and made his name known in every State in the Union. Mr. Grady was a typical Southern man, ardent in his love for his own section, loyal to the memory of those who fought in the struggle of a quarter of a century ago, but equally loyal to the duties and the nation of to-day. Warm-hearted, generous, and of a fervid imagination, Mr. Grady’s oratory recalled the best traditions of the Southern style; and the sincerity and geniality of his nature evoked the confidence and regard of his audience, while his eloquence thrilled them. His latest speech was delivered in Boston two weeks ago, on the race question, and was one of those rare addresses which carry with them an immediate broadening of the views of every auditor. Among the men of his own section Mr. Grady was probably the foremost leader of progressive ideas, and his death becomes for that reason a national loss.

A GLORIOUS MISSION.

All who admire true patriotism, brilliant talents, golden eloquence and ripe judgment, will regret the untimely taking off of the gifted Southern journalist and orator, Henry W. Grady, in the very zenith of his powers and fame. His eloquent address at the annual banquet of the Boston Merchants’ Association is still fresh in the minds of those who listened to him or read his glowing words in the columns of the press. It was the last and grandest effort of the brilliant young Southerner. It was the defense of his beloved South against the calumnies cast upon her, and the most lucid, convincing exposition of the race question ever presented at a public assemblage. Impassioned and heartfelt was his plea for Union and the abandonment of all sectionalism. These closing words of 451his address might fitly be inscribed upon his tomb: “Let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past with the spectacle of a Republic, compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love—loving from the Lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill—serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory—blazing out the path, and making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in God’s appointed time.” The words were all the more emphatic and convincing because they were spoken in the presence of an ex-president whose entire administration had been consecrated to such a Union of all sections, and who accomplished more in the grand work of obliterating the last traces of sectional strife and division than any other man who sat in the national executive chair.

Well may the South mourn over this fervid advocate of her honor, her rights, her interests, and regard his death a public calamity. Eloquence such as his is rarely given to men, and it was devoted wholly to his beloved land. It has done more to break down the barriers of prejudice and passion than a decade of homilies, dry arguments and elaborate statistics could effect. His was a most glorious mission, the bringing together in the closest bonds of fraternal love and confidence the sections which partisan malice, political selfishness and unconscionable malignity would keep apart. Whenever he spoke, the earnestness of his convictions, expressed in the noblest language, impressed itself upon the intelligence of his hearers. His last appeal, made, as he described it, “within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill, where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, and Emerson thought and Channing preached,” melted away the most hardened prejudice and enkindled in the New England heart the spirit of respect and sympathy for the brave, single-minded people of the South, who are so patiently and determinedly working out their destiny to make their beautiful land the abode of unalloyed peace and prosperity. Journalism will also mourn the loss of one of its brightest representatives. 452Henry W. Grady shone in the columns of his newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, with no less brilliancy than he did as an orator. Under his guidance that paper has become one of the brightest in the land. It will be difficult for the South to supply his place as patriot, journalist and orator. He was an effective foil to the Eliza Pinkston class of statesmen in and out of Congress.

HIS LOFTY IDEAL.

Few men die at thirty-eight whose departure is felt as a national loss, but Henry W. Grady was one. At an age when most men are just beginning to be known in their own States and to be recognized in their own section, he was known to the nation and recognized by the American people. At the South he represented the new pride in the material revival of a section desolated by the war. At the North he stood for loyal and enthusiastic support by the South of the new claims of the Union. His every appearance before the public was one more proof to the nation that the sons of those who fought the war were again one people and under one flag, cherishing different memories in the past, but pressing forward to the same lofty ideal of a homogeneous democratic society under republican institutions.

If Henry W. Grady spoke at the North he spoke for the South; if he spoke at the South he stood for Northern ideas in his own land. He was none the less true in both attitudes that his utterances were insensibly modified by his audiences. Eloquent, magnetic, impressionable, sharing to the full the sympathy every great speaker always has with his audience, his sentiment swung from extreme to extreme as he stood on a Northern or a Southern platform. It was always easy to pick flaws in them. Now and then 453his rhetorical sympathies placed him in a false position. But it was the inevitable condition of work like his that he should express extremes. If he had not felt and voiced the pride with which every Southerner must and should look back to the deathless valor of men we all rejoice to claim as Americans, he would have been worthless as a representative of the South. If he had not thrilled earlier than his fellows to the splendid national heritage with which defeat had dowered his people, he could never have awakened the applause of Northern audiences by expressions of loyalty and devotion to our common nation.

This service to both sections sprang from something more than sympathy. A moral courage Northern men can little understand was needed for him to oppose Southern treatment of the negro. Energy and industry, unknown among his fellows, were needed in the leadership he undertook in the material development of his State and section. It is easy now to see the enormous profit which lay in the material development of Georgia. Far-sighted provision was needed to urge the policy and aid the combination which made it possible ten years ago.

No one but a journalist, we are proud to say, could have done Mr. Grady’s work, and he brought to the work of journalism some of its highest qualifications. Ability as a writer, keen appreciation of “news,” and tireless industry, which he had, must all be held second to the power he possessed in an eminent degree of divining the drift and tendency of public feeling, being neither too early to lead it nor too late to control it. This divination Mr. Grady was daily displaying and he never made better use of it than in his last speech in Boston, the best of his life, in which he rose from mere rhetoric to a clear, earnest and convincing handling of fact. A great future was before him, all too soon cut off. He leaves to all journalists the inspiring example of the great opportunities which their profession offers to serve the progress of men and aid the advance of nations, by speaking to the present of the bright and radiant light of the future, and rising above the 454claims of party and the prejudice of locality to advocate the higher claims of patriotism and humanity.

HIS PATRIOTISM.

The death of Henry W. Grady, which occurred almost at the dawning of this beneficent Christmas time, did not “eclipse the gayety of nations,” as it was long ago said the death of another illustrious person did, but it still casts a shadow over his native land—a shadow which falls heavily upon all those of his countrymen who knew, honored and loved the man.

Henry W. Grady was one of the youngest, the most brilliant, the best beloved of the young men of his country who, since the war of secession, won distinction in public life. Whether considered as a writer or an orator, his talents were extraordinary. His language was strong, refined, and, in its poetic warmth and elegance, singularly beautiful. But that which gave to it its greatest value and charm was the wisdom of the thought, the sincerity of the high conscience of which it was the expression. It was given to him as it is to so few—the ability to wed noble thoughts to noble words—to make the pen more convincing than the sword in argument, to make the tongue proclaim “the Veritas that lurks beneath the letter’s unprolific sheath.”

Henry W. Grady was, in the truest sense, an American; his love of country, his unselfish devotion to it, were unquestioned and unquestionable; but he sought to serve it best by best serving the South, which he so greatly loved and which so loved and honored him. It was the New South of human freedom, material progress—not the Old South of chattel slavery and material sluggishness—of which he was the representative, the prophet. It was the South of to-day, 455which has put off the bitternesses, defeats and animosities of the war; which has put on the sentient spirit of real union, of marvelous physical development, which advances day by day to wealth, dignity and greatness by gigantic strides. This was the South that he glorified with pen and tongue, and which he sought with earnest, zealous love to bring into closer, warmer fraternity with the North and the North with it.

The story of the shield which hung in the forest, and which, to the traveler coming from the North, seemed to be made of gold, and to the traveler journeying from the South, to be made of silver, is an old one. But it has its new significance in every great matter to which there are two sides, and which is looked at by those approaching it from different directions from their respective points of view. He saw but one side of the race question—the Southern side, and for that he strenuously contended only a few days before his death, in the very shadow of Faneuil Hall, or, as he finely said: “Here, within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill—where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing preached—here, in the cradle of American letters and of American liberty.” It was in the house of his antagonists that he fought for the side which he thought good and just, and if in doing so he did not convince, he was listened to with respect and admiration.

That is a question not to be discussed here and now, and it is referred to only to show the courage of Mr. Grady in defence of his convictions, for they were convictions, and honest ones, and not mere political or sectional opinions. Apart from the race question, Mr. Grady was a man of peace, who, whether writing in his own influential journal in the South, or speaking in Boston, his tongue and voice were alike for peace, good will, unity of interest, thought and feeling. In his address of the 13th instant, at the Boston banquet, Mr. Grady said:

“A mighty duty, sir, a mighty inspiration impels every one of us to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever 456estranges, whatever divides. We, sir, are Americans, and we stand for human liberty! The uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth. France, Brazil—these are our victories. To redeem the earth from kingcraft and oppression, this is our mission! And we shall not fail. God has sown in our soil the seed of His millennial harvest, and He will not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until His full and perfect day has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown all the way—aye, even from the hour when, from the voiceless and trackless ocean, a new world rose to the sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that stupendous day—when the Old World will come to marvel and to learn, amid our gathered treasures—let us resolve to crown the miracles of our past with the spectacle of a republic, compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of love—loving from the Lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed in every heart as on every hill—serene and resplendent at the summit of human achievement and earthly glory—blazing out the path and making clear the way up which all the nations of the earth must come in God’s appointed time.”

The fine expression of these lofty sentiments shows the eloquence of the man, but, better than that, they themselves show the broad and noble spirit of his patriotism. And the man that his countrymen so admired and honored is dead, his usefulness ended, his voice silent, his pen idle forever, and he so young. There are no accidents, said Charles Sumner, in the economy of Providence; nor are there. The death of Henry W. Grady, which seems so premature, is yet part of the inscrutable design the perfectness of which may not be questioned, and out of it good will come which is now hidden. He was of those great spirits of whom Lowell sang:

457He was of those who even through death do good, and so posthumously work out the economy of Providence, for

ORATORY AND THE PRESS.

The lamented death of Mr. H. W. Grady affords a fit occasion for saying that oratory is not one of “the lost arts.” A great deal is said from time to time about the decadence of oratory as caused by the competition of the press. We are told that public address is held in slight esteem because the public prints are much more accessible and equally interesting. It is said that this operates in two ways, that the man who has something to say will always prefer to write rather than speak, because the printed page reaches tens of thousands, while the human voice can at most be heard by a few hundreds, and that not many people will take the trouble to attend a lecture when they can read discussions of the same subject by the lecturer himself, or others equally competent, without stirring from the evening lamp or exchanging slippers for boots. But there is a great deal of fallacy in such arguments. The press is the ally, not the supplanter of the platform. The functions of the two are so distinct that they cannot clash, yet so related that they are mutually helpful. Oratory is very much more than the vocal utterance, of fitting words. One of the ancients defined the three requisites of an orator as first, action; second, action; and third, action. If by action is meant all that accompanies speech, as gesture, emphasis, intonation, variety in time, and those subtle expressions that come through the flushing cheek and the 458gleaming eye, the enumeration was complete. Mr. Grady spoke with his lips not only, but with every form and feature of his bodily presence. Such oratory as his, and such as that of the man whose lecture on “The Lost Arts” proved that oratory is not one of them, will never be out of date while human nature remains what it is. There is, indeed, one class of public speakers whose occupation the press has nearly taken away. They are the “orators,” falsely so called, whose speech is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Cold type is fatal to their pretensions.

THE LESSON OF MR. GRADY’S LIFE.

Henry W. Grady is dead, but the lesson of his life will live and bear fruits for years to come. The young men of the South will not fail to note that the public journals of every faith in the North have discussed his life and death in the sincerest sympathy, and that not only his ability but his candor and courage have elicited universal commendation. Had Mr. Grady been anything less than a sincere Southerner in sympathy and conviction, he could have commanded the regulation praise of party organs in political conflicts, but he would have died little regretted in either section. He was a true son of the South; faithful to its interests, to its convictions, to its traditions; and he proved how plain was the way for the honest Southerner to be an honest patriot and a devoted supporter of the Union.

There are scores of men in the South, or who have lived there, and who have filled the highest public trusts within the gifts of their States, without commanding the sympathy or respect of any section of the country. Of the South, they were not in sympathy with their people or interests, and they have played their brief and accidental 459parts only to be forgotten when their work was done. They did not speak for the South; they were instruments of discord rather than of tranquility, and they left no impress upon the convictions or pulsations of either section.

But Mr. Grady was a true, able, candid, courageous son of the South, and he was as much respected under the shadows of Bunker Hill as in Georgia. Sincerely Southern in every sympathy, he was welcomed North and South as a patriot; and long after the Mahones and the Chalmers shall have been charitably forgotten, the name of Grady will be fresh in the greenest memories of the whole people of the country.

There is no better lesson for the young men of the South to study than the life, the aims and the efforts of Mr. Grady and the universal gratitude he commanded from every section. He was beloved in the South, where his noble qualities were commonly known, but he was respected in the North as an honest Southerner, who knew how to be true to his birthright and true to the Republic. The Northern press of every shade of political conviction has united in generous tribute to the young patriot of Georgia, and if his death shall widen and deepen the appreciation of his achievement among the young men of the South who must soon be the actors of the day, he may yet teach even more eloquently and successfully in the dreamless sleep of the grave than his matchless oratory ever taught in Atlanta or Boston.

HIS LOSS A GENERAL CALAMITY.

The sudden and lamentable death of Henry W. Grady will eclipse the gayety of the Christmas season in the South. He was a popular favorite throughout that section, and his loss is a general calamity. His public career was yet in its 460beginning. He had distinguished himself as an editor and as an orator, and high political honors awaited him quite as a matter of course. His qualities of head and heart fitted him admirably for the service of the people, and they trusted and loved him as they did no other of the younger Southern leaders. He believed in the new order of things, and was anxious to see the South redeemed from the blunders and superstitions of the past, and started on a career of rational and substantial progress. In the nature of things, he was obliged now and then to humor sectional prejudice, but he did it always in a graceful way, and set an example of moderation and good temper that was greatly to his credit. Without sacrificing in the least his honor or his sincerity as a devoted son of the South, he gave candid and appreciative recognition to the virtues of the North, and made himself at home in Boston the same as in Atlanta. The war was over with him in the best sense. He looked to the future, and all his aspirations were generous and wholesome.

If the political affairs of the South were in the control of men of the Grady pattern, a vast improvement would soon be made. He did not hesitate to denounce the methods which have so often brought deserved reproach upon the Southern people. He was not in sympathy with the theory that violence and fraud may be properly invoked to decide elections and shape the course of legislation. His impulses as a partisan stopped short of the feeling that everything is fair in politics. He did much to mollify and elevate the tone of public sentiment; and he would have done a great deal more if he had been spared to continue his salutary work. His loss is one of that kind which makes the decrees of fate so hard to understand. There was every reason why he should live and prosper. His opportunities of usefulness were abundant; his State and his country needed him; there was certain distinction in store for him. Under such circumstances death comes not as a logical result, but as an arbitrary interference with reasonable conditions and conceptions. We are bound to 461believe that the mystery has been made plain to the man himself; but here it is insoluble. The lesson of his sterling integrity, his patriotism and his cheerfulness is left, however, for his countrymen to study and enforce. Let us hope that in the South particularly it will not be neglected.

SADDEST OF SEQUELS.

The death of Henry W. Grady, the brilliant journalist and eloquent orator, will be sincerely deplored throughout the country. It is especially untimely, coming as it does as the saddest of sequels to a tour which promised much in the beginning, and which, in all save this ending, more than fulfilled the expectations of his friends. His brilliant speech in Boston was his last great effort, and it will long be remembered as one of his best. In it he plead, as it now proves, with the lips of a dying man, for true fraternity between the North and South. Had he lived, his burning appeals would have moved the country deeply. Now that it is known that the effort cost him his life, his words will have a touch of pathos in them as they are recalled by the men of all parties and all sections to whom they were so earnestly addressed. But even this increased effect given to his last appeal to the North will not compensate for the loss of such a man at this time. Henry W. Grady was distinctively the representative of the New South. Too young to have had an active part in the great struggle between the states, he came into active life at just the time when men like him were needed. His face was set toward the future. He belonged to and was identified with the progressive element which has already accomplished so much of positive achievement in the Southern States. He was a Southern man, recognized as a leader by Southern men, but with a breadth of mind and purpose which made 462him a part of the entire country. Under his leadership the South was sure to make progress, but its rapid march was to be to the music of the Union, and with every step the North and South were to be nearer together than at any previous time since the adoption of the Constitution. But his part in the great work is ended. His passionate voice is stilled and his active brain is at rest at a time in life when most men are entering upon their most effective work. Had he lived, a brilliant future was already assured to him, a future of leadership and of tremendous influence in public affairs. But his untimely death ends all. Others will take up his work as best they may; the New South will go forward with the development of its material interests, old animosities will fade away and the North and South will gradually come together in harmony of spirit and purpose, but the man of all others who seemed destined to lead in the great movement will have no further share in it. The South will mourn his early death most deeply, and the North will throw off its reserve sufficiently to extend its sincere sympathy, feeling that when such a man dies the loss is the nation’s rather than that of a single state or of a group of states.

A LIFE OF PROMISE.

In the death of Henry W. Grady, which occurred yesterday, journalism, the South, and the whole country suffered serious loss. He had come to occupy a large place, and one which cannot be filled. He was a connecting link between the old and the new South, with his face toward the East, albeit the shadows of the setting sun could be clearly discerned in his discussions of the vital questions of the day. His life seemed just begun, and big in the promise of usefulness. Two years ago he was known only 463as a journalist. He addressed the New England Society of New York on the evening of December 29, 1887. That speech made him famous. Since then his name has been a household word. For him to be stricken down at the early age of thirty-nine is little if any short of a public calamity.

It is a dangerous thing for a man of serious purpose to win renown as an after-dinner speaker. Post-prandial oratory is generally a kind of champagne, as effervescent as it is sparkling, but Mr. Grady struck a vein of thought at that New England banquet which had in it all the earnestness of patriotism. A Southerner with a strong sectional flavor, his influence, as a whole, was broadening. He never rose superior to the prejudice of race, but it may well be doubted if any Southerner could do so in these days without cutting himself off from all influence over his own people. There is nowhere visible in the Southern heavens the dawn of the day of equal justice, irrespective of race. In that regard Mr. Grady was neither better nor worse than his white neighbors. But with that exception his patriotism had largely outgrown its provincial environments.

Mr. Grady was a native of Georgia. His father seems to have been a follower of Alex. H. Stephens, for he was a Union man until the final test came, when he took up arms for the Confederacy, meeting death for the cause of his reluctant espousal. A graduate of the University of Georgia and later of the University of Virginia, the son had the best education the South could give. His newspaper life began early and was never interrupted. For several years he was co-editor and co-proprietor of the Atlanta Constitution, confessedly one of the leading newspapers of the country. Previous to his connection with the Constitution he was the correspondent of the Inter-Ocean and the New York Herald. Both as editor and correspondent he excelled. Both as editor and orator he has at different times spoken eloquently of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis his point of view being intermediate, and that fact, rather 464than any conscious vacillation, explains his seeming contradictions.

A few days ago the Southern people stood with uncovered heads by the grave of Jefferson Davis, the most conspicuous representative of the Old South, and now, before they had fairly returned from that funeral, they are called upon to attend the obsequies of the most conspicuous representative of the New South. These two notable men present much the same blending of resemblance and contrast, as do the evening and the morning stars. Certainly Mr. Grady, young, enthusiastic, and patriotic, was to the South a harbinger of brighter, more prosperous days.

ELECTRIFIED THE WHOLE COUNTRY.

The Christmas holidays, North and South, are saddened by the death of Henry W. Grady, the interesting young journalist of Atlanta, whose words of patriotism and of manly hope and encouragement for all sections, have more than once within a few years electrified the whole country. Mr. Grady won fame early, and in an uncommon manner. Though locally known in the South as a capable newspaper man, his name was not familiar to the general public until a few years ago, when, by a single speech at a banquet in a northern city, he attracted universal attention. Since then his utterances have carried weight, and scarcely a man speaking or writing on public topics has been more respectfully heard.

The key-note of Mr. Grady’s speeches on the South was that the past belief of its people in the “Lost Cause,” and their continued personal admiration for their leaders, should not and did not prevent them from accepting fully and in perfect good faith the results as they stand. He argued that the best elements, including the new generation, 465were only too willing and anxious to treat of the past as a condition wholly and irrevocably past—and, at that, a past which they would not recall if they could. From the North he asked a recognition of this new feeling, and the magnanimous consideration which would not assume that the South was still disloyal or rebellious merely because it refused to condemn itself and its leaders for the mistakes which brought it disaster.

The efforts of the deceased were to promote patriotic devotion to the Union in the South, and to induce the North to believe that the feeling existed. His evident sincerity and his eloquence in presenting the situation won cordial approval in the North, while in his own section he was applauded with equal warmth. His death will be very widely and deeply regretted, as that of a man of high and generous feeling whose influence, had he lived, promised to make for whatever was noble and good.

A LARGE BRAIN AND A LARGE HEART.

Throughout the entire North as well as in the South will there be heartfelt and sincere mourning over the death of this most distinguished editor on the other side of Mason and Dixon’s line. It was only ten days ago that he came North and delivered an address at the annual dinner of the Merchant’s Club of Boston, following it on the next evening with a speech before the Bay State Club, a Democratic organization. While on this trip Mr. Grady contracted a severe cold which was the immediate cause of his death yesterday morning.

The dead editor was a man of large brain and large heart. His hope was in the future of the South and he worked for the results which his prophetic ken perceived ahead of its present with great earnestness and great judgment. 466Since he became the editor of the Atlanta Constitution he has labored unceasingly to remedy the unfortunate conditions which operated against the progress and development of the South. Under his inspiring leadership and wise counsel many enterprises have been started and encouraged. There is no other one man to whom the New South owes so much as to Henry W. Grady. When he came to New York City two years ago, and in a notable address there told the people what this New South had done and was trying to do, the public was astonished at his statistics. The speech was so eloquent, so earnest, so broadly American in tone and spirit that it attracted wide attention and sent a thrill of admiration to the heart of every gratified reader. It made him not only famous but popular all through the North. This fame and popularity were increased by his recent excellent addresses in Boston. The Advertiser published, on Thursday last, on the fourth page, an extract from one of these speeches, entitled “The Hope of the Republic,” and we can do the dead man no better honor than to recommend to our readers that they turn back and read that extract again. It expresses the purest sentiment and highest appreciation of the foundation principles of the Republic.

Mr. Grady was a Democrat and a Southern Democrat. Yet he was a protectionist and believed that the development of the South depended upon the maintenance of the protective tariff. Under it the iron manufactures and various products of the soil in that section of our country have been increased to a wonderful extent while the general business interests have strengthened to a remarkable degree. Mr. Grady has encouraged the incoming of Northern laborers and capitalists and aided every legitimate enterprise. He has been a politician, always true to his party’s candidates, though he has been somewhat at variance with his party’s tariff policy. He has been a good man, a noble, true Christian gentleman, an earnest, faithful editor and a model laborer for the promotion of his people’s interests.

Henry W. Grady dead? It seems almost impossible.

Only ten days ago his fervid oratory rang out in a Boston banquet hall, and enchanted the hundreds of Boston’s business men who heard it. Only nine days ago the newspapers carried his glowing words and great thoughts into millions of homes. And now he lies in the South he loved so well—dead!

“He has work yet to do,” said the physician, as the great orator lay dying. “Perhaps his work is finished,” replied Mr. Grady’s mother. She was right. To the physician, as to many others, it must have seemed that Mr. Grady’s work was just beginning; that not much had yet been accomplished. For he was young; only thirty-eight years old. He had never held a public office, and there is a current delusion that office is the necessary condition of success for those endowed with political talents. But Mr. Grady had done his work, and it was a great work, too. He had done more, perhaps, than any other man to destroy the lingering animosities of the war and re-establish cordial relations between North and South. His silvery speech and graphic imagery had opened the minds of thousands of influential men of the North to a truer conception of the South. He had shown them that the Old South was a memory only; the New South a reality. And he had done more than any other man to open the eyes of the North to the peerless natural advantages of his section, so that streams of capital began to flow southward to develop those resources.

He was a living example of what a plain citizen may do for his country without the aid of wealth, office or higher position than his own talents and earnest patriotism gave him.

Boston joins with Atlanta and the South in mourning the untimely death of this eloquent orator, statesmanlike 468thinker, able journalist and model citizen. He will long be affectionately remembered in this city and throughout the North.

A LOYAL UNIONIST.

Mr. Grady was a loyal Unionist. The son of a Union veteran, proud of his sire’s part in the battle-fields of the rebellion, could not be more so. He stood manfully against the race prejudice which would lash the negro or plunder or terrorize him, but he recognized fully the difficulties of the race problem, and would not blink the fact, which every Northern man who sojourns in the South soon learns, that safety, progress, peace, and prosperity for that section forbid that the mere numerical superiority of the blacks should authorize them to push the white man, with his superior capability for affairs, from the places where laws are made and executed. Mr. Grady looked upon the situation dispassionately and told the truth about it to Northern audiences.

He was an active force in the journalism of the South, where the journal is still regarded largely as an organ of opinion and the personality of the editor counts for much. He entered the newspaper field when the modern idea of news excellence had obtained a full lodgment at the North and at one or two places South of the Ohio, and while he loved to occupy the pulpit of the fourth page he was not unmindful of the demand for a thorough newspaper.

HIS WORK WAS NOT IN VAIN.

The death of Henry W. Grady of the Atlanta Constitution is a loss to journalism, to the South and to the nation. 469He had done good work for each, and still more could reasonably be expected of him but for his untimely death at the comparatively early age of thirty-eight. His fatal illness was contracted when serving the cause of the whole country by pleading in the North for a more generous and just judgment of the Southern people and of their efforts to solve the race problem. He has done much toward bringing about a better understanding by his brilliant, earnest and logical addresses to Northern audiences, in which he abated nothing of that intense love for that part of the Union of which he was a native, but at the same time appealed to them as citizens of the same country, as brothers, to bury past differences, make allowance for conditions that were not desired and could not be avoided, and substitute friendly confidence for prejudiced suspicion. More of the same good work was expected of him, but as his mother said when speaking of his dangerous condition: “May be his work is finished.” Under his management the Constitution worked unceasingly for the physical and moral regeneration of the South. It preached the gospel of the “New South,” redeemed by work, by enterprise and by devotion to the Union of which the South is an integral part, and its preaching has not been in vain. With pen and tongue, equally eloquent with both, Mr. Grady labored in behalf of the cause he had so much at heart, and, although dying thus early, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his work was not in vain; that it is certain to bring forth good fruit.

THE BEST REPRESENTATIVE OF THE NEW SOUTH.

By the death of Henry Woodfin Grady the country loses one of its most brilliant journalists.

Throughout the country his death will be deplored as most untimely, for the future was bright before him. He 470had already, although only thirty-eight years old, reached the front rank in his profession, and he had been talked of as nominee for the vice-presidency. This eminence he won not only by his brilliant writing, but also by his integrity and high purposes. He never held an office, for though he could make and unmake political destinies, he never took for himself the distinctions he was able to bestow upon others. Though he inherited many ante-bellum prejudices and feelings, yet no editor of the South was more earnest, more fearless in denouncing the outrages and injustices from time to time visited upon the negro. So the American people have come to believe him the best representative of the “New South,” whose spokesman he was—an able journalist and an honest man who tried according to his convictions to make the newspaper what it should be, a living influence for the best things in our political, industrial and social life.

A LAMENTABLE LOSS TO THE COUNTRY.

He was a man of high faculties and purposes, and of great breadth of sympathy. He had courage of heart equal to capacity of brain, and placed in the core of the South, in her most busy city, and the undoubted representative man of her ambition and progress, it is lamentable that he should be lost to the country.

It seemed to be in no man’s grasp to do more good than he had appointed for his task. He has done that which will be memorable. It is something forever, to plow one deep furrow in fertile land for the seed that is in the air.

He is dead, as the poets that are loved must die, still counting his years in the thirties; and there is this compensation, that it may yet be said of him in the South, as 471was so beautifully sung by Longfellow of Burns in Scotland, that he haunts her fields in “immortal youth.”

A SAD LOSS.

The death of no other man than Henry Woodfin Grady could have plunged Georgia into such deep mourning as darkens all her borders to-day. Atlanta is the center of Georgia life, and Grady was the incarnation of Atlanta vitality. His was a personality difficult to associate with the idea of death. He was so thoroughly alive, bodily and mentally, he was so young, the fibers of his being reached out and were embedded in so many of the living interests of Georgia and the whole South, that no thought of his possible sudden end would rise in the minds of any who knew him. And his friends were legion. Everybody called him Henry.

In ten years he rose from obscurity to a prominence that made him the foremost figure of his day in the South, and had already linked his name with the second office in the gift of the American people. As an orator he was the pride of the South, as Chauncey M. Depew is of the North. As a journalist no Northern man bears the relation to his section that Grady did to the South. As a public-spirited citizen it seemed only necessary for Grady to espouse a project for it to succeed beyond all expectations. Yet but a few years ago he started three newspapers in succession 472and they all failed! Failure was the alphabet of his success.

When Mr. Grady bought a quarter interest in the Atlanta Constitution he had had but slender training in journalism. He had written a great deal, which is quite another thing. Though the Constitution has remained intensely provincial in its methods ever since, he has given it an influence in the South unrivalled by any other paper, with possibly one exception. Under his inspiration the Constitution viewed everything Georgian, and especially Atlantian, as better than similar things elsewhere. It backed up local enterprises with a warmth that shames the public spirit of most Northern cities. It boasted of local achievements with a vehemence that was admirable while it sometimes was amusing. Florid in his own speech and writing, Mr. Grady gathered about him on the Constitution men of similar gifts, who often wrote with pens dipped, as it were, in parti-colored inks, and filled its columns with ornate verbal illuminations. Yet amid much that was over-done and under-done there often appeared work of genuine merit. For the Constitution under Grady has been the vehicle by which some of the most talented of the late Southern writers have become familiar to the public. Grady was proud of them, and of his paper. “I have the brightest staff and the best newspaper in the United States,” he once remarked to this writer. And Mr. Grady firmly believed what he said.

It was as a speech-maker that Grady was best known at the North. Echoes of his eloquence had been heard here from time to time, but soon after the Charleston earthquake he made the address on “The New South,” before the New England Society at New York, that won for him the applause of the entire country, and must now stand as the greatest effort of his life. His recent speech in Boston is too fresh in mind to need attention here. Mr. Grady’s style was too florid to be wholly pleasing to admirers of strong and simple English. He dealt liberally in tropes and figures. He was by turns fervid and pathetic. He 473made his speeches, as he conducted his newspaper, in a manner quite his own. It pleased the people in Georgia, and even when he and his partner, Capt. Howell, ran the Constitution on both sides of the Prohibition question it was regarded as a brilliant stroke of journalistic genius.

Personally Mr. Grady was one of the most companionable and lovable of men. His hand and his purse were always open. His last act in Atlanta, when waiting at the depot for the train that bore him to the Boston banquet, was to head a subscription to send the Gate City Guard to attend Jefferson Davis’s funeral. His swarthy face was lighted by a bright, moist, black eye that flashed forth the keen, active spirit within. The impression left upon the mind after meeting him was of his remarkable alertness.

He will be a sad loss to Georgia, and to the South. There is none to take his place. His qualities and his usefulness must be divided henceforth among a number. No one man possesses them all.

WORDS OF VIRGIN GOLD.

The peaceful serenity of the Christmas festival is sadly married by the intelligence flashed over the wires from the fair Southern city of Atlanta to-day. “Death loves a shining mark,” and without warning it came and took away Henry W. Grady, the renowned orator and the brilliant editor, the man above all others who could least be spared by the South at this time. A week ago last Thursday night he stood up in the banquet hall at Boston and with charming eloquence delivered to the people of the North a message from the loyal South—a message that went out over the land and across the sea in words of pure, virgin gold, that will live long after he from whose lips they fell 474has returned to dust. Mr. Grady’s effort on that occasion attracted the admiration of the whole country. He spoke as one inspired, and his pathetic words at times moved strong men to tears and made a lasting impression upon all who were privileged to hear him. When he resumed his seat exhausted and perspiring, he became a prey to the chilling draughts and took a very severe cold. The evening next following he was banqueted by the Bay State Club of Boston, and when he arose to respond to a happy sentiment offered by the toastmaster in honor of the guest of the evening, he could scarcely speak. He apologized for his condition and spoke but briefly, and when he had finished the company arose and gave him a double round of cheers. Among the fine sentiments of his closing words, the last of his public utterances, were these: “There are those who want to fan the embers of war, but just as certain as there is a God in the heaven, when these uneasy insects of the hour perish in the heat that gave them life, the great clock of this Republic will tick out the slow moving and tranquil hour and the watchmen in the street will cry, ‘All is well! All is well!’” His last words were these: “We bring to your hearts that yearn for your confidence and love, the message of fellowship from our home, and this message comes from consecrated ground—ground consecrated to us by those who died in defeat. It is likely that I shall not again see Bostonians assembled together, therefore I want to take this occasion to thank you and my excellent friends of last night, and those friends who accompanied us this morning to Plymouth, for all that you have done for us since we have been here, and to say that whenever you come South, just speak your name and remember that Boston and Massachusetts is the watchword, and we will meet you at the gate.”

Mr. Grady returned home immediately, and his friends, who had prepared to greet him with a great reception, met him at the train only to learn that he was sick unto death. He was carried home suffering with pneumonia and at 3:40 A.M. to-day breathed his last. The nations will stop amid 475the Christmas festivities to lay upon the bier of the dead Southerner a wealth of tenderness and love.

It was as an editor that Grady was best known. His brilliant and forceful contributions made the Atlanta Constitution famous from one end of this broad land to the other. As an orator he was master of an accurate and rhythmical diction which swept through sustained flights to majestic altitudes. We will deal with the statistical record of his life at another time, and can only add here that it is a matter for sincere regret that he has been taken away before he had reached the summit of his fame or the meridian of his usefulness.

SAD NEWS.

The untimely death yesterday of Henry Woodfin Grady is sad news. He was predisposed to lung diseases, and the circumstances of his visit to Boston were most unfortunate. The weather was very mild when he arrived here, but became suddenly chill and wintry just before his departure. Half our native population seemed to have caught cold owing to the sudden and severe change in temperature, and Mr. Grady contracted pneumonia in its most violent form, so that he grew steadily worse to the end. His trip to Boston was eagerly anticipated, both because he had never been in New England, and also for the reason that the greatest interest had been created both North and South over the announcement that he would speak on the race problem. The impression made by his address—for it rose far above the ordinary after-dinner speech—is still strong, and the expectation created in the South is attested by the fact that a body-guard, as it were, of admiring friends from among leading representative Southerners made the trip with Mr. Grady for the express purpose of hearing his exposition of the race problem.

476Of Mr. Grady’s address there is nothing new to add. It was one of the finest specimens of elegant and fervid oratory which this generation has heard. It met the fondest anticipations of his friends, and the people of his native State had planned to pay him extraordinary honors for the surpassing manner in which he plead their cause. The address, considered in all respects, was superior to that which he delivered in New York and which won national reputation for him. His treatment of the race problem was in no respect new, and it met with only a limited approval, but while he did not convince, Mr. Grady certainly won from the North a larger measure of intelligent appreciation of the problem laid upon the South. It was impossible not to perceive his sincerity, and we recognized in him and in his address the type and embodiment of the most advanced sentiment in the generation which has sprung up at the South since the war. Mr. Grady’s father lost his life in the Confederate army; Mr. Grady himself spoke in the North to Union veterans and their sons. It was perhaps impossible, from the natural environments of the situation, that he should speak to the entire acceptance of his auditors, or that he should give utterance to the ultimate policy which will prevail in the settlement of the race problem. But we of the North can and do say that Mr. Grady has made it easier for one of another generation, removed from the war, to see with clearer vision and to speak to the whole country on the race problem with greater acceptance than would now be possible. To have done this is to do much, and it is in striking contrast with the latter-day efforts of that other great figure in Southern life who has but lately gone down to the grave unreconciled.

The North laments the death of Mr. Grady, and sincerely trusts that his mantle as an apostle of the New South will fall upon worthy shoulders. Business interests are bringing the North and South together at a wonderfully rapid rate. This is not the day nor the generation in which to witness perfect that substantial agreement for 477which we all hope. But we are confident that if to the firmness of the Northern views upon the civil rights of the black man there be added a fuller measure of sympathy for those who must work out the problem, and if Mr. Grady’s spirit of loyalty, national pride and brotherly kindness becomes deeply rooted in the South, the future will be promising for the successful solution of that problem which weighs so heavily upon every lover of his country.

A LEADER OF LEADERS.

The death of Henry W. Grady, chief editor of the Atlanta Constitution, is an irreparable loss to the South. Of all the many and influential newspaper men of that section, Mr. Grady can only be compared with Mr. Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, in point of distinction; and while Watterson is the better equipped journalist, Grady was the greater popular leader. He was not only a brilliant and forceful writer, but a most eloquent and impressive speaker, and one of the most sagacious in council.

Mr. Grady was only ten years old when the civil war spread its terrible pall over the land, and he was only a school-boy when his native South was left defeated, desolated and despairing by the failure of the Confederacy. He grew up with the new generation that is so rapidly succeeding the actors of that great conflict in both sections. He escaped the luxury and effeminacy of fortune; he had to grapple with poverty amidst an almost hopeless people; and he was one of the earliest of the new generation to rise to the full stature of manly duty. Thoroughly Southern in sympathy, and keenly sharing the memories which are sacred to all who wore and supported the gray, he saw 478the new occasion with its new duties as the latent wealth of the South, that so long slumbered under the blight of slavery, gave promise of development; and alike in his own Empire State of the South, and in the great metropolis of the Union and in the Bay State citadel of opposite political views, he ever declared the same sentiments and cemented the bond of common brotherhood.

And no other young man of the South gave so much promise of future honors and usefulness as did Mr. Grady. He has fallen ere he had reached the full noontide of life, and when his public career was just at its threshold. He could have been United States Senator at the last election had he not given his plighted faith to another; and even with the office left to go by default, it was with reluctance that the Legislature, fresh from the people, passed him by in obedience to his own command. That he would have been leader of leaders in the South, yea, in the whole Union, is not doubted; and he was the one man of the present in the South who might have been called to the Vice-Presidency had his life been spared. He was free from the blemish of the Confederate Brigadier, that is ever likely to be an obstacle to a popular election to the Presidency or Vice-Presidency, and he was so thoroughly and so grandly typical of the New South, with its new pulsations, its new progress, its new patriotism, that his political promotion seemed plainly written in the records of fate.

But Henry W. Grady has fallen in the journey with his face yet looking to the noonday sun, and it is only the vindication of truth to say that he leaves no one who can fully take his place. Other young men of the South will have their struggling paths brightened by the refulgence his efforts and achievements reflect upon them, but to-day his death leaves a gap in Southern leadership that will not be speedily filled. And he will be mourned not only by those who sympathized with him in public effort. He was one of the most genial, noble and lovable of men in every relation of life, and from the homes of Georgia, and from the 479by-ways of the sorrowing as well as from the circles of ambition, there will be sobbing hearts over the grave of Henry W. Grady.

A FORCEFUL ADVOCATE.

The death of Henry Woodfin Grady, the brilliant young Southern editor and orator, which took place at Atlanta, Ga., was almost tragic in its suddenness; it will make a profound impression at the South, and will be deeply deplored here at the North, where he had come to be known as a florid yet forceful advocate and apologist of his section. He had lately caught the ear of the country, and while his speeches provoked critical replies, it may be said in his honor that he, more than any other Southerner, had lifted the plane of sectional debate from that of futile recriminations to more dignified and candid interchanges of opinion. That is saying much for a man who was a lad during the rebellion, and who had not passed his thirty-ninth birthday. He was a man of pronounced views, perhaps given more to pictures of prosperity than to the methods of its attainment, and when upon the platform he carried the crowd by the force of that genius for passionate appeals which his Irish ancestry and Southern training had given him in full measure. No Southerner had put the conflict of races in so reassuring a light; but he was not old enough or far-seeing enough to realize that the problem can and will be solved,—and that by Southerners.

Mr. Grady called about him a formidable group of young Democrats filled with the spirit of the New South. They believed that Georgia would rise and the South be reconstructed in the broadest sense by the multiplication of factories and the advancement of trade. These young men selected Gov. Colquitt for their standard-bearer in the 480State election of 1880, and Mr. Grady was made chairman of the campaign committee. Colquitt during his first term had offended the Democratic regulars, and the young men carried the war into the back country. The vote at the primaries was unprecedentedly heavy. Colquitt carried the State and was the first governor elected under the new constitution. Grady never held public office, but it was supposed that he had been selected by the Democratic leaders as Gov. Gordon’s successor, and many thought that he was angling for the second place on the Democratic national ticket in 1892.

The attention of the North was first called to the brilliant Georgian by his address at New York in June, 1887, at the annual dinner of the New England Society. His speech at the Washington Centennial banquet last spring was rather a disappointment, but he fully recovered his prestige the other day at Boston, where he shared the honors of a notable occasion with Grover Cleveland. Mr. Grady found time from his editorial work to write an occasional magazine article, but his subject was his one absorbing study—the South and its future.

HIS GREAT WORK.

The death of the brilliant young Southerner whose eloquence yet rings in our ears followed so closely upon his visit to Boston that it doubtless arouses a keener sense of regret and a clearer realization of loss here than in other communities. Mr. Grady, moreover, in speaking for the New South, whose aspirations he so ably represented, while addressing the whole nation, yet brought himself more closely to New England in his arguments, his contrasts and his fervid appeals; and, whether it was admiration of his courage in combating the remnants of traditional prejudices 481in the heart of the section in which this feeling once was the strongest, or a sympathy with the sentiments which he expressed in such captivating language, it cannot be doubted that the warmest recognition which he has received outside his own State is that which he won from this community.

In all his efforts to spread that knowledge of the sentiments and the purposes of the South which would tend to make the restored union of the States more secure and more harmonious, Mr. Grady has addressed himself especially to New England. It was at the meeting of the New England Society in New York, in 1886, that he made the first notable speech which evoked such a ready and generous response from all sections of the country; and the last public words which he spoke in furtherance of the same purpose were those delivered upon Plymouth Rock at the end of the recent visit which he described as a pilgrimage.

It is seldom, indeed, that a people or an idea has the fortune to possess such an advocate as Mr. Grady. He not only knew where to carry his plea, but he had a rare gift of eloquence in presenting it. Whether Mr. Grady, as his field of effort enlarged, would have developed a more varied talent as an orator, can never be known; but in the illustration of the one subject on which he made himself heard before the people he showed himself a master of the art. On this topic, full of inspiration for him, he spoke with a brilliancy and power which were unapproachable. Since Wendell Phillips, there is none possessed of such a strength of fervid eloquence as that which this young man displayed. Much of the effect produced by his speeches, of course, must be attributed to the existence of a sentiment seldom aroused, but ready to respond to such an appeal; but when every allowance is made for the circumstances under which he achieved his triumphs of oratory, there remains the inimitable charm which gave power and effect to his words.

If Mr. Grady had been simply a rhetorician, his place in the public estimation would be far different from that which 482is now accorded him. Without the talent which he possessed in so remarkable degree, he could not have produced the effect which he did; but back of the manner in which he said what he had to say, which moved men to tears and to applause, were the boldness, the frankness and the entire sincerity of the man. His words brought conviction as his glowing phrases stirred the sentiment of his hearers, and amid all the embellishments of oratory there was presented the substantial fabric of fact. His last speech in Boston was as strong in its argument as it was delightful in its rhetoric.

The influence which Mr. Grady has exerted upon the great movement which has consolidated the Union and brought the South forward in the march of industrial development cannot now be estimated. He has not lived to see the realization of what he hoped. But there can be no doubt that his short life of activity in the great work will have far-reaching results.

NEW ENGLAND’S SORROW.

The death of Henry W. Grady comes at a time and under conditions which will cause a deep feeling of sorrow and regret in the minds of the people of New England. He came to us only a few days ago as a representative of our Southern fellow-countrymen, grasping the hand of good will that was extended to him, and professing, in the eloquent addresses that he made, a desire to do all that he could to allay any differences of opinion or prejudices that might exist between the people of the North and those of the South. One means of doing this, and one which appealed particularly to the inhabitants of New England, was the unquestioned admiration that he had for our traditions and institutions, an admiration which he owned 483was so far cherished in the South as to lead many of its people to copy our methods. The New South was a change from the Old South, for the reason that its people were discarding their former theories and opinions, and were to a large degree copying those which we have always held.

It is needless at this time to speak of Mr. Grady’s attempt to defend the Southern method of settling the race problem, but, although there were many who believed that he did not fully make out his case, his statement of it threw a light upon the question which was probably new to a large number of those who heard or read his words.

Of Mr. Grady’s eloquence it can be said that it was spontaneity itself. Rarely has a man been gifted with so remarkable a command of language and so complete a knowledge of its felicitous use. There was in his address an exuberance of fancy which age and a wider experience of men and methods would have qualified, but no one can doubt that this gift of his, combined as it was with high intentions and honesty of purpose, would have made of him in a few years more, if he had been spared, a man of national importance in the affairs of our country.

It is sad to think that this young and promising life was thus unexpectedly cut off, and by causes which seem to have been avoidable ones. It is probable that Mr. Grady unconsciously overtaxed himself on his Northern trip. He arrived in this city suffering from a severe cold, which would probably have yielded to a day or two of complete rest. But not only were there fixed appointments which he had come here to meet, but new engagements and duties were assumed, so that during his short stay here he was not only in a whirl of mental excitement, but was undergoing constant physical exposure.

A man of less rugged strength would have yielded under this trial before it was half over, but Mr. Grady’s physique carried him through, and those who heard his last speech, probably the last he ever delivered, at the dinner of the Bay State Club, will remember that, though he 484excused himself on account of his physical disabilities, the extemporaneous address was full of the fire and pathos of his native eloquence. But, although unaware of the sacrifice he was making, it is probable that Mr. Grady weakened himself by these over-exertions to an extent that made him an easy prey to the subtle advance of disease.

His death causes a vacancy that cannot easily be filled. The South was in need, and in years to come may be in still greater need, of an advocate such as he would have been. She will, no doubt, find substitutes for this journalist-orator, but we doubt whether any of these will, in so short a time, win by their words the attention of the entire American people or so deservedly hold their respect and admiration.

A NOBLE LIFE ENDED.

The country will be startled to learn of the death of Henry W. Grady. No man within the past three years has come so suddenly before the American people, occupying so large a share of interested attention not only in the South but in the North. None has wielded a greater influence or made for himself a higher place in the public regard. The career of Mr. Grady reads like a romance. Like a true Georgian, he was born with the instincts of his people developed to a marked degree, and his rise to a position of honor and usefulness was certain, should his life be spared. But like the average man, even in this country of free opportunities, he had to fight his way over obstacles which would have discouraged if not crushed out the spirit of a less courageous and indomitable man. He was too young to take any part in the late great internal strife, but as a bright-minded boy he emerged from that contest with vivid and bitter memories, an orphan, his father having fallen beneath the “Stars and Bars.” His 485young manhood, while not altogether clouded by poverty, started him upon the battle of life without any special favoring circumstances, and without the support of influential friends to do for him in a measure what doubtless would gladly have been done could his future have been foreseen. But he started out for himself, and in the rugged school of experience was severely taught the lessons of self-reliance and individual energy which were to prepare him for the responsibilities of intellectual leadership amongst a people in a sadly disorganized condition, who were groping in the dark, as it were, seeking the light of prosperity. He never but for a short time left his own State, and as his field of observation and work enlarged and his influence extended, his love for it seemed to grow more intense. It became with him, indeed, a passion that was always conspicuous, and upon which he loved to dwell, with pen or tongue, and some of his tributes to the Empire Commonwealth of the South, as he loved to call it, will proudly be recorded by the future historian of the annals of the time.

It was as an active editor of the Atlanta Constitution that Mr. Grady found the sphere of labor in which he was to win high honor, and from which he was to send out an influence measured only by the boundaries of the South itself, if it did not extend, in fact, to the borders of the nation. He wrote and spoke, when appearing in public, from a patriotic and full heart. His utterances were those of a man deeply in love with his country, and earnestly desirous of promoting her highest prosperity and happiness. Some of his deliverances were prose poems that will be read with delight by future generations of Southern youth. They came forth flashing like meteors, doubtless to the astonishment of their author himself, for he seemed to reach national prominence at a single bound. There were times when Mr. Grady seemed to falter and slip aside in discussing some of the burning questions of the hour, but this was due to his great sympathy with his own people, his toleration of their prejudices, and his desire to keep step 486with them and be one with them throughout his work in their behalf. But he was an ardent young patriot, a zealous and true friend of progress, and the New South will miss him as it would miss no other man of the time. He set a brilliant example to the younger men as well. He reached for and grasped with a hearty grip the hand of the North in the spirit of true fraternity, and it is a pathetic incident that the climax to his career should have been an address in the very center of the advanced thought of New England. His death seems almost tragic, and doubtless was indirectly, at least, due to the immense pace at which he had been traveling within the past three years; a victim of the prevailing American vice of intellectual men, driving the machine at a furious rate, when suddenly the silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken, and the people of the Southland will go mourning for one who ought, they will sadly think, to have been spared them for many years, to help them work out their political, industrial, and social salvation. The name of Henry W. Grady is sure of an enduring and honored place in the history of the State of Georgia, and in the annals of the public discussions in the American press, during a time of great importance, of questions of vast concern to the whole people.

A TYPICAL SOUTHERNER.

In the death of Henry W. Grady the South has lost one of its most eminent citizens and the newspaper press of the whole country one of its most brilliant and dashing editors. He was a typical Southerner, impulsive, sentimental, emotional, and magnetic in his presence and speech, possessing those qualities which Henry Watterson once said were characteristic of Southerners as compared with the reasoning, reflective, mathematical nature of Northern men. His 487death will be a sad loss to his paper and to the journalism of the whole country. He was a high-toned, chivalrous gentleman, and a brilliant, enthusiastic, and able editor, who worked his way to the top by the sheer force of his native ability and gained a wide circle of admirers, not alone by his indefatigable and versatile pen but also by the magnetism and eloquence of his oratory. It is a matter for profound regret that a journalist of such abilities and promise should have been cut off even before he had reached his prime.

HIS NAME A HOUSEHOLD POSSESSION.

A few years ago there shot athwart the sky of Southern journalism a meteor of unusual brilliancy. From its first flash to its last expiring spark it was glorious, beautiful, strong. It gave light where there had been darkness, strength where there had been weakness, hope where there had been despair. To the faint-hearted it had given cheer, to the timid courage, to the weary vigor and energy.

The electric wires yesterday must have trembled with emotion while flashing to the outside world the startling intelligence that Henry W. Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, was dead. It was only last week this same world was reading the touching and pathetic tribute his pen had paid to the dead Southern chief; or less than a week, listening with pleased and attentive ears to the silver tones of his oratory at the base of Plymouth Rock, as he plead for fair play for the people of his own sunny Southland.

Henry W. Grady was one of the foremost journalists of the day. He was still numbered among the young men of the Republic, yet his name and fame had already become a household possession in every part of the Union. Not 488only was he a writer of remarkable vigor, but he was also a finished orator and a skillful diplomat. As a writer he combined the finish of a Prentiss with the strength and vigor of a Greeley. Not so profuse, possibly, as Watterson, he was yet more solid and consistent. By force of genius he had trodden difficulty and failure under foot and had climbed to the highest rung of the ladder.

By his own people he was idolized—by those of other sections highly esteemed. Whenever he wrote all classes read. When he spoke, all people listened.

He was a genuine product of the South, yet he was thoroughly National in his views. The vision of his intelligence took in not only Georgia and Alabama, but all the States; for he believed in the Republic and was glad the South was a part of it.

His death is not only a loss to Atlanta and Georgia, to the South and the North, but a calamity to journalism.

EDITOR, ORATOR, STATESMAN, PATRIOT.

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 489of 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 490of 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.

A SOUTHERN BEREAVEMENT.

The loss which the Daily Constitution sustains in the death of Mr. Grady is not a loss to a newspaper company only; it is a loss to Atlanta, to Georgia, to the whole South. Mr. Grady belonged to a new era of things south of the Ohio River. He was never found looking over his shoulder in order to keep in sympathy with the people among whom he had always lived. He was more than abreast of the times in the South, he kept a little in advance, and his spirit was rapidly becoming contagious. He wasted no time sighing over the past, he was getting all there is of life in the present and preparing for greater things for himself and the South in the future. His life expectancy was great, for though already of national reputation he had not yet reached his prime.

There was much of the antithetical in the lives of the two representative Southern men who have but just passed away. The one lived in the past, the other in the future. The one saw but little hope for Southern people because the “cause” was “lost,” the other believed in a mightier empire still because the Union was preserved. The one, full of years, had finished his course, which had been full of mistakes. The other had not only kept the faith, but had barely entered upon a course that was full of promise. The one was the ashes of the past, the other, like the orange-tree of his own sunny clime, had the ripe fruit of the present and the bud of the future. The death of the 491one was long since discounted, the death of the other comes like a sudden calamity in a happy Christmas home. The North joins the South to-day in mourning for Grady.

A MAN WHO WILL BE MISSED.

The death of Mr. Henry W. Grady, of the Atlanta Constitution, is a loss to South and North alike. The section which poured out a few days ago its tributes of regret for the leader of the Southern Confederacy may well dye its mourning a deeper hue in memory of this greater and better man, whose useful life is cut short before he had reached his prime. Mr. Grady has held a peculiar and trying position; and in it he has done more, perhaps, than any other one man to make the two sections separated by the War of the Rebellion understand each other, and to bring them from a mere observance of what we might call a political modus vivendi to a cordial and real union. It was not as a journalist, although in his profession he was both strong and brilliant, it was rather as the earnest and eloquent representative of the New South, and as the spokesman of her people that he had acquired national prominence. He was one of the few who both cared and dared to tell to the people of either section some truths about themselves and about the other that were wholesome if they were not altogether palatable. He was wholly and desperately in earnest. He had much of the devotion to his own section and his own State that characterized the Southerner before the war. But he had what they had not: a conception of national unity; of the power and glory and honor of the nation as a whole, that made him respected everywhere. Whether he appeared in Boston or in Atlanta, he was sure of an interested and sympathetic audience; and his fervid orations, if they sometimes 492avoided unpleasant issues and decked with flowers the scarred face of the ugly fact, did much, nevertheless, to turn the eyes of the people away from the past and toward the future.

We have been far from agreeing with Mr. Grady’s opinions, either socially or politically. The patriotic people of the North can have no sympathy with the attempt to cover with honor the memory of treason, which found in him an ardent apologist. We believe that we have gone to the limit of magnanimity when we agree to forego question and memory, and simply treat the men who led and the men who followed in the effort to destroy the nation as if that effort had never been made. And we do not hold that man as guilty of sectionalism and treason to a reunited country who talks hotly of “rebels” and sneers at “brigadiers,” as that man who speaks of these leaders of a lost cause as “patriots,” obedient to the call of duty. To that error Mr. Grady, in common with other leaders of his time, inclined the people of his section. Politically he was, of course, through good or through evil report, an uncompromising Democrat. Nor can we think his treatment of the race issue a happy one. The North has come, at last, to do justice to the South in this respect, and to acknowledge that the problem presented to her for solution in the existence there of two races, politically equal before the law but forever distinct in social and sentimental relations, is the gravest and most difficult in our history. But the mere plea to let it alone, which is the substance of Mr. Grady’s repeated appeal, is not the answer that must come. It is not worthy of the people, either North or South. It is not satisfactory, it is not final, and the present demands more of her sons. But, in presenting these points of difference, it is not intended to undervalue the work which Mr. Grady did or underestimate the value of the service that lay before him. With tongue and pen he taught his people the beauty and the value of that national unity into which we have been reborn. He sought to lead them out of the bitterness of political strife, 493to set their faces toward the material development that is always a serviceable factor in the solution of political problems, and to make of the new South something worthy of the name. The work that he did was worthy, and there is none who can take and fill his place. The death that plunged the South in mourning a short time ago was merely the passing of an unhealthful reminiscence. The death of Grady is a sorrow and a loss in which her people may feel that the regret and the sympathy of the North are joined with theirs.

AT THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER.

The death of Henry W. Grady will be received with profound regret throughout the Northern States, while in the South there will be deeper and more heartfelt sorrow than the death of Jefferson Davis called forth. The book of Mr. Davis’s life was closed before his death, but it seemed as if we were but at the beginning of Mr. Grady’s career, with a future that held out brilliant promise. He had all the characteristics of warm-blooded Southern oratory, and his magnetic periods, that touched heart and brain alike, were devoted to the single purpose of rehabilitating the South by an appeal to the generosity and justice of the North. No speech of recent years had a greater effect than his splendid oration at the New England Society dinner in New York last year on the “New South.” It was happily and appropriately supplemented by his recent address to the merchants of Boston. He was a martyr to the cause he advocated and personated, for it was in the chill atmosphere of New England he contracted the disease of which he died. Rarely has it been given to any man to gain such reputation and appreciation as fell to Mr. Grady as the outcome of his two speeches in New York and Boston. He was only thirty-eight years old; at 494the very beginning of what promised to be a great career, of vast benefit to his section and country. He was essentially of the New South; slavery and old politics were to him a reminiscence and tradition. At home he was frank and courageous in reminding the South of its duties and lapses. At the North he was the intrepid and eloquent defender and champion of the South. Both fields called for courage and good faith.

THE PEACE-MAKERS.

The premature death of Mr. Grady has taken from the career of journalism one of its most brilliant followers. In him has passed away also an orator of exceptional powers, ready, versatile, and eloquent, a man of many gifts, a student with the largest resources of literary culture, and at the same time enabled by his practical experience and training to use these resources to the best advantage.

But the point we wish especially to note is that Mr. Grady, while deeply attached to the South, and inheriting memories of the great civil contest which made him early an orphan, was one of those who both recognized the finality of the issue and had the courage to say so.

He will be remembered at the North as one who spoke eloquent words of conciliation and friendship, who did his share in healing the wounds of war, and in smoothing the way toward complete national accord. “Blessed are the peace-makers” is the inscription one would place above his too-early opened grave.

We have not the space at our command to do extended justice to Mr. Grady’s great powers, or to picture at length his bright history. That has been done in other places and by other hands. But we cannot pass by the work he did 495for reconciliation without some expression of acknowledgment. Such words as his, offered in behalf of peace, will survive not merely in their immediate effect, but in the example they set.

ONE OF THE BRIGHTEST.

One of the brightest men in America passed away on Monday. Henry W. Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Georgia’s leading paper, and which has come to be regarded by many as the ablest paper in the South, had within a very brief period impressed his personality upon the current history of the nation. Five years ago he was little more than locally known. Being a guest at a dinner of the New England Society at Boston, he made a speech which was the happiest inspiration and effort of his life. It was the right word spoken at the right time. It lifted him at once to the dignity of a national figure. It was the greeting of the New South to the new order of things. It touched the great heart of the North by its warm tribute to the patriotism and faithfulness of the martyred President, Abraham Lincoln, being the first Southern utterance which did full justice to the memory of that great man. It was not a sycophantic nor an apologetic speech, but the voice of one who accepts accomplished results in their fullness, recognizes all the merits of his opponent, and bravely faces the future without heart-burnings or vain regrets. Mr. Grady’s speech was published in almost every paper in the land, in whole or in part, and, to borrow an old phrase, “he woke up one morning and found himself famous.” Since then all that he has written, said or done has been in the same line of patriotic duty. He has been no apologist for anything done by the South during the war. He never cringed. He was willing that he and his should bear all the responsibility of their course. But he loved the whole 496reunited country, and all that he spoke or wrote was intended to advance good feeling between the sections and the common benefit of all.

Mr. Grady was a partisan, but in the higher sense. He never descended to the lower levels of controversy. His weapon was argument, not abuse. And he was capable of rising above his party’s platform. He could not be shackled by committees or conventions. He nervily and consistently proclaimed his adhesion to the doctrine of protection to American industry, although it placed him out of line with his party associates.

THE SOUTH’S NOBLE SON.

The whole country is deeply grieved and shocked by the announcement of the death of Mr. Henry W. Grady of Atlanta, Georgia, which occurred last Monday morning. The land was yet ringing with the matchless eloquence of his magnificent speech at the merchants’ dinner in Boston, when the news of his illness came, closely followed by that of his death. The press of the country was yet teeming with the applause of its best representatives, when the voice that evoked it is stilled in death, and one of the most brilliant careers of this generation is suddenly and prematurely closed. Mr. Grady caught a severe cold during his visit to Boston, and grew ill rapidly during his return journey. On his arrival home, he was found to be seriously ill of pneumonia, and the dread disease took a rapid course to a fatal termination. Mr. Grady was one of the most popular men in the South. He was an eloquent orator and brilliant writer. He was born in 1851 in Georgia, graduated at the State University and also took a course at the University of Virginia. On coming out of college, Mr. Grady embarked in journalism and devoted a comfortable 497fortune to gaining the experience of a successful newspaper man. Under his management the Constitution of Atlanta, Ga., has gained a very large circulation. Mr. Grady has persistently refused to accept office. He won National fame as an orator by his speech at the Pilgrims’ dinner in Brooklyn, two years ago, and has been in great demand at banquets and similar occasions ever since. His eloquence was of the warm, moving sort that appeals to the emotions, his logic was sound and careful and all his utterances were marked by sincerity and candor. He has also no doubt done more than any one man to remove the prejudices and misunderstandings that have embittered the people of the North and South against each other politically, and to raise the great race problems of the day from the ruck of sectionalism and partisanship upon the high plane of national statesmanship. The South has lost a brave, noble and brilliant son, who served her as effectively as devotedly; but his work was needed as much and quite as useful at the North, and his death is indeed a national misfortune.

BRILLIANT AND GIFTED.

It is with a grief that we cannot express, that we write the above name, and add that he who bore it is no longer among the living. The most brilliant and gifted man in all the South—the one who, though still young, had acquired immense popularity and influence, which made him useful alike to the South and to the whole country—has gone to his grave. He has died in his prime, at the early age of thirty-eight, in the maturity of his powers, with the rich promise of life all before him.

Our acquaintance with Mr. Grady began nine years ago, when we saw him for the first time in the office of a brother of ours, who was able to give him the help which 498he needed to purchase a quarter of the Atlanta Constitution. This at once made his position, as it gave him a point of vantage from which to exercise his wonderful gifts. From that moment his career was open before him; his genius would do the rest. This kindness he never forgot, and it led to his personal relations with us, which afterwards became those of intimacy and friendship.

When we first saw him, his face was almost boyish, round and ruddy with health, his eyes sparkling with intelligence, as well as with the wit and humor which he perhaps inherited from some ancestor of Irish blood. His face, like his character, matured with years; yet it always had a youthful appearance, which was the outward token of the immense vitality within him. We have seldom known a man who was so intensely alive—alive to the very tips of his fingers. As a writer, he was one of the very best for the variety of work required in the office of a great journal. His style was animated and picturesque, and he had an infinite versatility; turning his pen now to this subject and now to that; throwing off here a sharp paragraph, and there a vigorous editorial; but never in either writing a dull line. The same freshness and alertness of mind he showed in conversation, where he was as brilliant as with his pen. He would tell a story with all the animation and mimicry of an actor, alternating with touches of humor and pathos that were quite inimitable. It was the chief pleasure of our visit to Atlanta to renew this delightful acquaintance—a pleasure which we had twice last winter in going to, and returning from, Florida. Never shall we forget the last time that we sat before his fire, with his charming family and several clergymen of Atlanta, and listened to the endless variety of his marvelous talk.

Nor was his power confined to this limited circle. He was not only a brilliant conversationalist and writer, but a genuine orator. No man could take an audience from the first sentence, and hold it to the last, more perfectly than he. His speech before the New England Society in this 499city three years ago gave him at once a national reputation. It came to us when abroad, and even so far away, on the shores of the Mediterranean, at Palermo, in Sicily, we were thrilled by its fervid eloquence. A second speech, not less powerful, was delivered but two weeks since in Boston; and it was in coming on to this, and in a visit to Plymouth Rock, where he was called upon to make a speech in the open air, that he took the cold which developed into pneumonia, and caused his death.

But Mr. Grady’s chief claim to grateful remembrance by the whole country is that he was a pacificator between the North and the South. Born in the South, he loved it intensely. His own family had suffered in the war an irreparable loss. He once said to us as we came from his house, where we had been to call upon his mother, whose gentle face was saddened by a great sorrow that had cast a shadow over her life, “You know my father was killed at Petersburg.” But in spite of these sad memories, he cherished no hatred, nor bitterness, but felt that the prosperity of millions depended on a complete reconciliation of the two sections, so that North and South should once more be one country. This aim he kept constantly in view, both in his speeches and in his writings, wherein there were some things in which we did not agree, as our readers may see in the letter published this very week on our first page. But we always recognized his sincerity and manliness, and his ardent love for the land of his birth, for all which we admired him and loved him—and love him still—and on this Christmas day approach with the great crowd of mourners, and cast this flower upon his new-made grave.

THE DEATH OF HENRY W. GRADY.

“The South is in tears!” said the sorrowful dispatch from Atlanta on Monday last; and the grief and the sympathy 500of the North went freely southward in response. Next to his own city, indeed, this death strikes Boston most deeply, for here with us, only a few days ago, he poured forth the noblest stream of eloquence that ever flowed from his gifted tongue. It matters not now that many New Englanders, the Pilot included, dissented from his Southern view of the colored question. We disagreed with the word, but we honored the silver tongue and the heart of gold beneath it. “He was the most eloquent man,” said the Hon. P. A. Collins, one who knows what eloquence consists of, “that I ever heard speak in Boston.”

Since the olden times there has been no more striking illustration of the power of oratory to appeal to the nation and to make a man famous among his people than is found in the career of Mr. Grady. Within ten years he leaped from the position of a modest Georgian editor to that of the best-known and the greatest orator on this continent. So potent is the true gift of eloquence when the substructure is recognized as solid in character and profoundly earnest in purpose.

To Irish-Americans, as to the State that has lost him, the death of Mr. Grady is a special affliction. He represented in a fine type the patriotism and the manly quality of a citizen that every Irish-American ought to keep in spiritual sight. He was a man to be trusted and loved. He was a proud Georgian and a patriotic American, though his father had died for “the Lost Cause.” He was, while in Boston, introduced to the great audience by Colonel Charles H. Taylor as “the matchless orator of Georgia.” Playfully, and yet half seriously, he accounted for himself thus: “My father was an Irishman—and my mother was a woman. I come naturally by my eloquence.”

North or South, it matters not the section—all men must honor such a character. His brief life reached a high achievement. He was a type of American to be hailed with delight—courageous, ready of hand and voice, proudly sentimental yet widely reserved, devoted to his State and loyal to the Republic, public-spirited as a statesman, and industrious 501and frugal as a townsman, and the head of a happy family. His devotion to his parents and to his wife and children was the last lesson of his life. In his Boston speech he drew tears from thousands by the unnamed picture of his father’s death for the bleeding South; from Boston he went South, insisting on being taken to his home when they told him in New York that he was dangerously ill. He died surrounded by his own—mother, wife, and children. Almost his last words to his mother were: “Father died fighting for the South, and I am happy to die talking for her.”

ALAS, that the hero of the New South should follow, and in so short a time, the typical hero and representative of the Old! With hearts still bowed beneath the shadow of the flags at half-mast all over the South for Jefferson Davis, comes the sad and sudden message announcing the death of Henry W. Grady.

Poor Grady! Dead in the very summer time and blossom and golden fruitage of a brilliant life! Fallen, while yet so young and in the arms of his first overwhelming victory. Fallen on the topmost crest of a grand achievement—on the shining heights he had just so bravely won! Hapless fate, that he could not survive to realize the full fruition of his sublime endeavor! He went North only a few days ago on a mission of love and reconciliation, his great heart bearing the sorrows of the South, his big brain pulsing with patriotic purpose. Of a nervous, sensitive nature, his physical system, in sympathy with his intellectual triumph, both strained to the utmost tension, rendered him susceptible to the sudden change of climate, and he contracted a severe cold which soon developed into pneumonia, attended by a burning fever. Returning home he was met at the depot by what had been arranged for a grand ovation and a banquet at the Chamber of Commerce, by the people of Atlanta, but instead of being carried on the strong shoulders of the thousands who loved and honored him, he was received into the gentle arms of his family and physicians and borne tenderly home, to linger yet for a little while with the fond circle whose love, deep, strong, and tender as it was, appealed in vain against the hard decree of the great conqueror.

506As Mr. Grady so eloquently expressed in his last hours: “Tell mother I died for the South, the land I love so well!” And this was as true as it could be of any patriot who falls on the field of battle.

But has death, indeed, reaped the fruit? May not the very sacrifice, in itself, consecrate his last eloquent and inspired words till they sink deeper into the hearts of the North and South alike, thus linked with a more sacred memory and a sublimer sorrow? If so, we shall find a larger recompense even in the bitter bereavement.

As far as his personal history is concerned, Henry Grady could not have died a nobler death. The Greek philosopher said: “Esteem no man happy while he lives.” He who falls victorious, the citadel won, in a blaze of glory, is safe; safe from all the vicissitudes of fortune; safe from any act that might otherwise tarnish an illustrious name. It descends a rich heritage to after time. During the presidential campaign of 1844 the wonderful orator, Sargent S. Prentiss, delivered at Nashville, to an immense audience, the greatest campaign speech, perhaps, that was ever heard in the United States. After speaking for several hours, and just as he was closing an eloquent burst of oratory, he fell fainting in the arms of several of the bystanders. At once there was a rush to resuscitate him, but Governor Jones, thoroughly inspired by the speech and occasion, sprang from his seat, in a stentorian voice shouting: “Die! Prentiss; die! You’ll never have a better time!”

The Times-Union has heretofore commented on Mr. Grady’s magnificent oration at Boston. It not only captured New England and the South, but the entire country. Nothing like it since the war has been uttered. In force, power, eloquence, it has been but rarely excelled in any time. Major Audley Maxwell, a leading Boston lawyer, 507describes it in a letter to a friend in this city as “a cannon-ball in full flight, fringed with flowers.” The occasion, the audience, the surroundings, were all inspiring. He was pleading for the South—for the people he loved—and to say that he reached the topmost height of the great argument, is comment and compliment enough. The closing paragraphs are republished this morning, and no man ever uttered a sublimer peroration. He spoke as one might have spoken standing consciously within the circling wings of death, when the mind is expanded by the rapid crowding of great events and the lips are touched with prophetic fire.

The death of Henry Grady was a public calamity. He had the ear of the North as no other Southern man had, or has. He was old enough to have served in the Confederate armies, yet young enough, at the surrender, while cherishing the traditions of the past, to still lay firm hold on the future in earnest sympathy for a restored and reconciled Union. In this work he was the South’s most conspicuous leader.

But his life-work is finished. Let the people of the South re-form their broken ranks and move forward to the completion of the work which his genius made more easy of accomplishment and which his death has sanctified. In the words he himself would have spoken, the words employed by another brilliant leader on undertaking a great campaign, each of the soldiers enlisted for the South’s continued progress will cry: “Spurn me if I flee; support me if I fall, but let us move on! In God’s name, let us move on!”

THERE WAS NONE GREATER.

The Chronicle confesses to being a hero-worshiper. There is no trait in the human heart more noble than that which applauds and commemorates the feats of brains or 508arms done by our fellow-man. We confess the almost holy veneration we feel for the heroes of song and story from the beginning of tradition. Nimrod to Joseph and Moses to the Maccabees, from Alexander to Cæsar, taking in the heroes of all nations from Cheops to Napoleon and Wellington, Putnam, Sam Houston and Lee and Grant and Lincoln, we do honor to them all.

So too do we worship the sages and orators. Whatever man the people worship is worthy of a place in our Pantheon. The people are the best judges of a man, and when the common people pay tribute to the worth of any man well known to them, we are ready to lift our hats and acknowledge his title to greatness. Any man who has the enthusiastic admiration of his own people is worthy of any honor.

The South has many brilliant writers, but none of them have ever made the columns of a newspaper glisten and glow and hold in magnetic enchantment the mind of the reader as Henry Grady did. In his life-work he was great, and there is none greater. His writings are worthy of a place beside those of Greeley and Watterson, and Grady was still a young man.

In the days gone by the South has sent many orators North to present Southern thought to Northern hearers. Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs and William L. Yancey all went before Grady was invited to speak up there. There were never four greater orators in the world’s history, and the story of their speeches has come down to us like music. Yet in this latter day when oratory does not appeal to people as it used to, when the busy world does not stop to read speeches, Grady went North to speak. He was known to the North and had done nothing to challenge the attention of the nation, yet his first speech at the North did catch public attention most pleasantly. His second speech, delivered but a few days ago, was the greatest effort of his life, and all the nations listened to it and all the newspapers commented upon his utterances. His speech was the equal of any oration 509ever delivered in America, and had as much effect on public thought. No effort of Toombs or Yancey, even in the days of public excitement, surpassed this last speech of Grady.

He deserves a place among the great men of America, and the South must hold his memory in reverence. A broken shaft must be his monument, for as sure as life had been spared him new honors were in store for this young man. He had made his place in the world, and he was equal to any call made upon him, and the people were learning to look to him as a leader. Few such men are born, and too much honor cannot be done them.

A GREAT LEADER HAS FALLEN.

In the death of Mr. Henry W. Grady the South loses its brightest and most useful man. He was the only Southern man who really had the ear of the people of the whole country, and he had just reached the position where he could be useful in the largest sphere. It is inexplicable why so young and robust a man—(he was not over thirty-nine years of age)—a man so brilliant and so able, should be taken just as he was entering upon the plane of wider influence and greater usefulness. To the South it is the greatest loss that it has sustained by death in a quarter of a century. To the whole people of the country, which he loved with his great-hearted devotion, it is nothing short of a National calamity.

510Mr. Grady had the ear and heart of the South because he loved its history and its very soil, and because he was the leading exponent of the idea that is working to build up a prosperous manufacturing New South. He had the ear of the North because, while he had no apologies to make for Southern actions and was proud of Southern achievements, he had turned his eyes to the morning and lived in the busy world of to-day. He recognized changed conditions and did not bemoan fate. He stood up in his manliness and his faith and went to work to bring prosperity where poverty cast its blight. He inspired others in the South with faith in the future of his section, and invited Northern men of money, brains, and brawn to come South and make a fortune; and when they accepted his invitation, as not a few did, he gave them a brotherly welcome and made them feel that they were at home. In this he showed practical patriotism. Under no temptation—even when speaking in Boston—did he ever so far forget his manhood as to

The people of the North also heard him because of his candor. He never deceived them about the race problem or the difficulties in the way of the South’s future. He admitted their gravity, and sought a peaceful solution in a just, fair, and honest way. His speech in Boston was a lamentation and an earnest appeal. He cried aloud for sympathetic help, and his cry, sealed with his life, we must believe, will not be heard in vain. God grant that his prayer for Peace and Union may be answered!

Mr. Grady’s most attractive quality was his warm great heartedness. He was generous to a fault. No tale of suffering or poverty was unheeded by him. He had a buoyant spirit and a light heart and deep affections. He was reverent in speech and with pen. He believed in God, had learned the truth of the gospel at his mother’s knee, “The truest altar I have yet found,” he said in his last speech. 511He was a member of the Methodist church. He had profound convictions, and his eloquent speeches in favor of Prohibition in Atlanta will not be forgotten. No man ever spoke more earnest words for what he conceived to be the safety of the homes of Atlanta than he. They will long be treasured up with fondness by those who mourn that he was cut down in the zenith of what promised the most brilliant career that lay out before any man in America.

Henry W. Grady was a grandson of North Carolina. His father was a native of Macon county, but early in life emigrated to Rome, Georgia, to make his fortune, and he made it. He was one of those men who succeed in every undertaking. Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. He prospered and made a large estate. When the war came on he had a presentiment that he would be killed. But notwithstanding that idea took possession of him, he raised and equipped at his own expense a regiment of cavalry, and hastened to the front as its captain. His company was attached as company G to the 25th N.C. Regiment, commanded by Col. Thos. L. Clingman. Eventually Capt. Grady was promoted to be major of the regiment. In the first battle he fell mortally wounded, showing how true was his presentiment of death. He was surrounded by his men, some of them brave, sturdy North Carolinians. He left a legacy of honor to his son, who always called North Carolina his grandmother and had a deep affection for its sons.

Mr. Grady graduated with high honors at the University of Georgia in Athens. Then he spent two years at the University of Virginia, where he devoted himself rather to the study of literature and to the work of the societies than to the regular college course. He won high honors there as an orator and as a debater. He was as well equipped and as ready and as effective as a debater as he became later on as an orator and editor. He was regarded there as a universal genius and the most charming of men. Leaving college he established a paper at Rome. Later in connection with Mr. Alston (North Carolina stock) he 512established the Atlanta Herald. It was a brilliant paper but was not a financial success. Our readers will remember that Mr. Alston was shot in the Capitol by State Treasurer Cox. Upon the failure of the Herald, Mr. Grady went to New York. He was without money and went there looking for something to do. He went into the office of the New York Herald and asked for a position.

“What can you do?” asked the managing editor, when Mr. Grady asked for a position. “Anything,” was the reply of the young Georgian, conscious of his powers and conscious of ability to do any kind of work that was to be done in a great newspaper office. The editor asked him where he was from, and learning that he was from Georgia, said: “Do you know anything about Georgia politics?” Now if there was any subject which he knew all about it was Georgia politics, and he said so. “Then sit down,” said the managing editor, “and write me an article on Georgia politics.” He sat down and dashed off an article of the brightest matter showing thorough insight into the situation in Georgia and thorough knowledge of the leaders in that State. He was always a facile writer, and all his articles were printed without erasing or re-writing. The article was put into the pigeon-hole, and Mr. Grady took his departure. He left the office, so he said, very despondent, thinking the article might be published after several weeks, but fearing that it would never see the light. What was his surprise and joy to see it in the Herald the next morning. He went down to the office and was engaged as correspondent for Georgia and the South. In this capacity he wrote letters upon Southern topics of such brilliancy as have never been surpassed, if equaled, in the history of American journalism. They gained for him a wide reputation, and made him a great favorite in Georgia. The public men of that State recognized his ability, and saw how much he might do to develop the resources and advance the prosperity and fame of Georgia if at the head of a great State paper. The late Alexander H. Stephens interested himself in Mr. Grady and assisted to get him on the staff 513of the Constitution. From the day he went to Atlanta on the staff of the Constitution until his death his best energies and his great abilities were directed toward making it a great paper, and a powerful factor in developing the resources of Georgia. It became the most successful of Southern newspapers, and is to-day a competitor with the great papers of the North. To have achieved this unprecedented success in journalism were honor enough to win in a life-time. He was confessedly the Gamaliel of Southern journalism, and the best of it all was that he was, as was said of Horace Greeley after his death, “a journalist because he had something to say which he believed mankind would be the better for knowing; not because he wanted something for himself which journalism might secure for him.”

He was a Saul, and stood head and shoulders above all his fellows as an orator as well as an editor. We cannot dwell upon his reputation as an orator, or recount the scenes of his successes. We had heard him only in impromptu efforts and in short introductory speeches, where he easily surpassed any man whom we ever heard. He had a fine physique, a big, round, open, manly face, was thick-set, was pleasing in style, and had a winning and captivating voice. He could rival Senator Vance in telling an anecdote. He could equal Senator Ransom in a polished, graceful oration. He could put Governor Fowle to his best in his classical illustrations. He could equal Waddell in his eloquent flights. In a word he had more talent as a public speaker than any man we ever knew; and added to that he had heart, soul, fire—the essentials of true oratory. We recall four speeches which gave him greatest reputation. One was in Texas at a college commencement, we think; another at the New York banquet on “The New South”; the third at the University of Virginia; and the last—(alas! his last words)—at the Boston banquet just two weeks ago. These speeches, as well as others he has made, deserve to live. The last one—published in last week’s Chronicle—is emphasized by 514his untimely death. In it he had so ably and eloquently defended the South and so convincingly plead for a united country based upon mutual confidence and sympathy that, in view of his death, his words seem to have been touched by a patriotism and a devoutness akin to inspiration. His broad catholicity and his great patriotism bridged all sectional lines, and he stood before the country the most eloquent advocate of “a Union of Hearts” as well as a “Union of Hands.” As the coming greatest leader of the South, he sounded the key-note of sublimest patriotism. Less profound than Daniel Webster, his burning words for the perpetuity of the Union, with mutual trust and no sectional antagonism, were not less thrilling nor impressive. The Southern people ought to read and re-read this great speech, which, doubtless, cost him his life, and make it the lamp to their feet. If we heed his words and bury sectionalism, it will be written of him that “though dead, he yet speaketh.”

HENRY W. GRADY.

Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, died yesterday, after a short illness, from typhoid pneumonia, at the early age of thirty-six. Perhaps no man in 515the South has been more often mentioned in the last few years or attracted more attention than he. His famous speech before the New England Society had the effect of bringing him before the country as the representative of that New South which is building up into prosperity and greatness.

Mr. Grady was a native of Georgia. His father was Colonel of a Confederate regiment during the late war, and to that father he paid the highest tribute a son could pay in several of his speeches. He had a hard struggle at first, like nearly every Southern boy, but he fought his way up to the top by pluck, energy and determination.

Mr. Grady’s first journalistic venture was, we believe, in his native town. He ran a small paper there, moved thence to Atlanta, carrying on another newspaper venture in the Georgia capital. In the course of events this paper was swallowed up by the Constitution, then pushing itself to the front of the Georgia press, and Mr. Grady was selected as co-editor of the latter.

Under him that paper became one of the leading exponents of Southern opinion, a representative of the progressive South, not lingering over dead memories, but living in the light of the present and laboring to build up this section.

Mr. Grady and his paper were always the defenders of the South, yet not afraid to expose and condemn its errors and mistakes. He had the courage to speak out whenever this was necessary, and when, some few months ago, regulators attempted to introduce into Georgia, in the immediate vicinity of Atlanta, the same practices as in Lafayette parish in this State, Mr. Grady, through the Constitution, denounced it vigorously. There were threats, but it did not affect the Constitution, which insisted that the New South must be a South of peace, law and order.

We cannot at this time review Mr. Grady’s entire journalistic career. It is sufficient to say that with his colleagues he built up his paper to be a power in Georgia and the South. His ability was recognized throughout 516this section, but it was not until his famous speech at the New England dinner that his reputation became national.

When at that dinner, speaking for the New South he so well represented, he pledged his brethren of the North the patriotic devotion of the Southern people, he created a sensation. Some of the most famous orators of the country were present, but without a dissenting voice it was declared that Mr. Grady’s speech was the event of the day. It sent a thrill throughout the Union. The Southern people rose to declare that Mr. Grady had fully explained their views and ideas, and before his eloquent words the prejudice which had lingered since the war in many portions of the North disappeared. Perhaps no single event tended more to bring the sections closer together than that speech, which so eloquently voiced the true sentiments of the Southern people. A wave of fraternal feeling swept through the country, and although the Republican politicians managed to counteract some of the good accomplished, much of it remained. Mr. Grady deserves remembrance, for in a few words, burning with eloquence, he swept away the prejudices of years.

The country discovered that it contained an orator of whom it had known but little, a statesman who helped to remove the sectional hatred which had so long retarded its progress. Mr. Grady became at once one of the best-known men in the Union. He was spoken of for United States Senator, he was mentioned as Vice-President, and it looked as though he could be elevated to any position to which he aspired; but he wisely clung to his journalistic career, satisfied that he could thereby best benefit his State and section.

Mr. Grady was not a one-speech man. He has made many addresses since then, and while it is true that his other speeches did not create the same sensation as his first, they were all eloquent, able and patriotic.

His career so auspiciously begun, which promised so much to himself and the country, has been brought suddenly and prematurely to a close. Mr. Grady was a 517young man, and we had every reason to believe that he would play a leading part in the South and in the country. Although his career is thus cut short, he had accomplished much, and the New South for which he spoke will carry on the good work he began of uniting the entire country on one broad and patriotic platform.

SECOND TO NONE.

Henry W. Grady died at his home in Atlanta yesterday. There is that in the very announcement which is heart-breaking. He was the rose and expectancy of the young South, the one publicist of the New South, who, inheriting the spirit of the old, yet had realized the present, and looked into the future, with the eyes of a statesman and the heart of a patriot. His own future was fully assured. He had made his place; had won his spurs; and he possessed the gifts, not merely to hold them, but greatly to magnify their importance. That he should be cut down upon the threshold of a career, for whose brilliant development and broad usefulness all was prepared, is almost as much a public calamity as it is a private grief. We tender to his family, and to Georgia, whom he loved with the adoration of a true son for a mother, the homage of our respectful and profound sympathy.

Mr. Grady became a writer for the Courier-Journal when but little more than a boy and during the darkest days of the Reconstruction period. There was in those days but a single political issue for the South. Our hand was in the lion’s mouth, and we could do nothing, hope for nothing, until we got it out. The young Georgian was ardent, impetuous, the son of a father slain in battle, the offspring of a section, the child of a province; yet he rose to the situation with uncommon faculties of courage and 518perception; caught the spirit of the struggle against reaction with perfect reach; and threw himself into the liberal and progressive movements of the time with the genius of a man born for both oratory and affairs. He was not long with us. He wished a wider field of duty, and went East, carrying letters in which he was commended in terms which might have seemed extravagant then, but which he more than vindicated. His final settlement in the capital of his native State and in a position where he could speak directly and responsibly, gave him the opportunity he had sought to make a fame for himself, and an audience of his own. Here he carried the policy with which, in the columns of the Courier-Journal, he had early identified himself, to its finest conclusions; coming at once to the front as a champion of a free South and a united country, second to none in efficiency, equaled by none in eloquence.

He was eager and aspiring, and, in the heedlessness of youth, with its aggressive ambitions, may not have been at all times discriminating and considerate in the objects of his attacks; but he was generous to a fault, and, as he advanced upon the highway, he broadened with it and to it, and, if he had lived, would have realized the fullest measure of his own promise and the hopes of his friends. The scales of error, when error he felt he had committed, were fast falling from his eyes, and he was frank to own his changed, or changing view. The vista of the way ahead was opening before him with its far perspective clear to his mental sight. He had just delivered an utterance of exceeding weight and value, at once rhetorically fine and rarely solid, and was coming home to be welcomed by his people with open arms, when the Messenger of Death summoned him to his last account. The tidings of the fatal termination of his disorder are startling in their suddenness and unexpectedness, and will be received North and South with sorrow deep and sincere, and far beyond the bounds compassed by his personality.

The Courier-Journal was always proud of him, hailed 519him as a young disciple who had surpassed his elders in learning and power, recognized in him a master voice and soul, followed his career with admiring interest, and recorded his triumphs with ever-increasing sympathy and appreciation. It is with poignant regret that we record his death. Such spirits are not of a generation, but of an epoch; and it will be long before the South will find one to take the place made conspicuously vacant by his absence.

A LOSS TO THE SOUTH.

The death of Henry W. Grady, of Atlanta, after so brief an illness and in the very prime of a vigorous young manhood, will startle the whole country and will be an especial affliction to the South. Mr. Grady was a brilliant journalist, a man of brain and heart, and by his sensible and enthusiastic policy has identified himself with the interests of the New South. In fact, few men have been more largely instrumental in bringing about that salutary sentiment, now prevailing, that it is best for the South to look with hope and courage to the future, rather than to live in sad inactivity amid the ruins of the past. Mr. Grady was a warm and confident advocate of industrial advancement in the land of his birth. He wanted to see the South interlaced with railroads, her rich mineral deposits opened to development, her cities teeming with factories, her people busy, contented and prosperous. This was his mission as a man and as a journalist, and his influence has been widespread. Just at this time his loss will be doubly severe.

One morning Henry Grady, who had possessed little more than a sectional reputation, woke up to find himself famous throughout the nation. By his speech at a New York banquet he sounded the key-note of fraternal Union 520between North and South, and his appeal for mutual trust and confidence, with commerce and industry to cement more strongly than ever the two great sections of the country, met with a response from both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line more hearty than ever before. Many another man from the South felt the same sentiments and would have expressed them gladly. Many a man in the North felt that in the South those sentiments were sincerely held. But Grady had a peculiar opportunity, and right well did he improve it. He expressed eloquently and forcibly the feelings, the purposes, the very spirit of the New South, and in that very moment he made a reputation that is national. It was his good fortune to express to the business men as well as to the politicians of the nation the idea of an indivisible union of interests, of sentiments and of purposes, as well as of territory.

In Mr. Grady’s own State his death will be most felt. What he has done for Georgia can only be appreciated by those who compare its present activity and prosperity with the apathy and discontent which existed there a few years ago. The dead man will be sincerely mourned, but the idea which he made the fundamental one of his brief career will continue to work out the welfare of the New South.

THE DEATH OF HENRY W. GRADY.

The most brilliant journalist of the South is no more. When the news was sent over the country yesterday morning that Henry W. Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, was dead, there were sighs of regret which, if they could have been gathered together into one mass, would have been heard across the Atlantic. He was peculiarly gifted. With an imagery and wealth of language that enabled him to clothe the most uninteresting subject 521in a pleasing garb, he had at the same time the genius of common sense more fully developed than most men now prominently before the public. He was born in 1851 in the town of Athens, Georgia, and was therefore less than forty years of age. At college he was remarkable among his fellows for those gifts of speech and pen which made him famous. To his eternal honor, it can be said that in neither the sanctum or the forum were his powers used in a way to add to any one’s sorrow or distress. His writings were clean and pure and in every line gave token of the kind heart that beat in his bosom. Mr. Grady was a lovable man. Those who knew him well entertained for him the deepest affection. His face was itself a fair type of his nature, which was essentially of the sunshine character.

He was restlessly energetic and always agitating matters that he believed would be promotive of the public good. The Cotton States’ Exposition and the Piedmont Exposition, both held in Atlanta, were literally the creations of his energy and enthusiasm and pluck. It will no doubt be readily admitted by his associates of the Constitution that he was its moving spirit, and by his powers largely made it the grand and magnificent success that it undeniably is.

The Young Men’s Christian Association building, costing $100,000, arose as by magic under the persuasive powers of his tongue and pen. The list of his works of a practical kind that now add to Atlanta’s character and position could be indefinitely extended. When he appealed to Atlanta he never spoke in vain, for in addition to brains and energy he had those rare qualities of personal magnetism, which made his originality and zeal wonderfully effective. He entered into everything his big head conceived with his whole heart and soul.

He was loyal to his city and State, and never missed an opportunity for aiding in their advancement. He was sought out by the young and the old, and enjoyed the full confidence of all who knew him.

His name and fame, however, were not confined to 522Georgia. In the Lone Star State, thousands flocked to the city of Dallas to hear his great speech at the Texas State Fair. His New York speech, a year or two ago, fairly thrilled the country and caused the enactment of scenes never before witnessed on similar occasions. No orator had ever received such an ovation in that great city, and none such has been since extended to any speaker. His recent speech at Boston was calculated to do more good for the entire country than anything that has fallen from the lips of any man in the last decade. It will be a monument to his memory more enduring than brass. It made a profound impression on those who heard it. The sentiments and truths he so boldly uttered are echoing and re-echoing among the hills of New England and over the prairies of the great West, and they will bear rich fruit in the near future. They were things known to us all here, but those who did not know and did not care have been set to thinking by his eloquent presentation of the Southern situation. That speech, perhaps, cost him his life; but if it produces the effect on the Northern mind and heart which it deserves, the great sacrifice will not have been in vain. His death will cause a more earnest attention to the great truths he uttered, and result in an emphasis of them that could not have been attained otherwise, sad as that emphasis may be. The death of such a man is a national calamity. He had entered upon a career that would have grown more brilliant each year of his life. His like will not soon be seen and heard again.

UNIVERSAL SORROW.

The news of Mr. Grady’s death is received with universal sorrow. No man of his age in the South or in the Union has achieved such prominence or given promise of 523greater usefulness or higher honors. His reputation as a journalist was deservedly high; but he won greater distinction, perhaps, by his public speeches. He was intensely, almost devoutly Southern, but he had always the respectful attention of the North when he spoke for the land of his nativity. There was the ring of sincerity in his fervid utterances, and his audiences, whether in the North or in the South, felt that every word came hot from the heart. He has done as much as any man to put the South right before the world; and few have done more to promote its progress and prosperity. He was a man of tremendous energy, bodily and mental, and always worked at high tension. Whatever subject interested him took his mind and body captive, and into whatever cause he enlisted he threw all the powers of his intellect and all the force of a nature ardent, passionate, and enthusiastic in the extreme. It is probable that the disease which laid hold of him found him an easier prey because of the restless energy which had pushed his physical powers beyond their capacity. His nervous and impetuous temperament showed no mercy to the physical man and made it impossible for him to exercise a prudent self-restraint even when the danger of a serious illness was present with him.

Mr. Grady’s personal traits were such as won the love of all who knew him. All knew the brilliant intellect; but few knew the warm, unselfish heart. The place which he held in public esteem was but one side of his character; the place which he held in the hearts of his friends was the other.

The South has other men of genius and of promise; but none who combine the rare and peculiar qualities which made Henry W. Grady, at the age of thirty-eight, one of the most conspicuous men of his generation.

The death of Henry W. Grady has removed from earth the most prominent figure among the younger generation of public men in America. He held unquestionably the highest place in the admiration and regard of the people of the South that was accorded to any man of his years, and had won, indeed, by his own efforts and attainments a place among the older and the most honored representatives of the people of the whole country. It was said of him by a Northern writer, a few days before his death, that no other Southern man could command so large a share of the attention of the Northern people, and his death was the result of a visit to New England, whither he went in response to an earnest invitation to speak to the people of that section upon a question of the gravest national concern.

The people of Georgia both honored and loved Henry Grady, and would have elected him to any office within their gift. It is probable that, had he lived but a little while longer, he would have been made Governor of the State, or commissioned to represent it in the Senate of the United States. He would have filled either of these positions acceptably and with credit to himself; and perhaps even higher honors awaited him. When his name was mentioned a few months ago in connection with the nomination for the second highest office in the gift of the people of the whole country, the feeling was general and sincere that he was fully worthy, at least, of the great dignity which it was proposed to confer upon him. Certainly no other evidence is required to prove that the brave and brilliant young Georgian was a marked man, and that he had already made a deep impression on the events and the men of his time when he was so suddenly stricken down in the flower of useful and glorious manhood.

It is inexpressibly saddening to contemplate the untimely 525ending of so promising a career. Only a few days ago the brightest prospect that could open before the eyes of any young man in all this broad land lay before the eyes of Henry Grady. To-day his eyes are closed to all earthly scenes. To-morrow the shadows of the grave will close around him forever. But it will be long before his influence will cease to be felt. The memory of his kindly, gracious presence, of his eloquent words and earnest work, of his generous deeds and noble example in the discharge of all the duties of citizenship, will ever remain with those who knew him best and loved him most.

To his wife and children he has left a rich inheritance in his honored name, though he had left them nothing else. The people of his State and of the South owe him a large debt of gratitude. He served them faithfully and devotedly. What he said so well, only a few months ago, of one who served with him, and who like him was stricken down in the prime of his life, can be said of Henry Grady himself. It is true of him also that “his leadership has never been abused, its opportunities never wasted, its power never prostituted, its suggestions never misdirected.” Georgia surely is a better and more prosperous State “because he lived in it and gave his life freely and daily to her service.”

And surely, again, “no better than this could be said of any man,” as he said, and for as much to be written, in truth and sincerity, over his grave, the best and proudest man might be willing to toil through life and to meet death at last, as he met it, “unfearing and tranquil.” His own life, and the record and the close of his life, are best described in these his own words, written ten months ago, and, perhaps, no more fitting epitaph could be inscribed on his tomb than the words which he spoke, almost at the last, in the hour of his death: “Send word to mother to pray for me. Tell her if I die, that I died while trying to serve the South—the land I love so well.”

The death yesterday at Atlanta of Henry W. Grady, editor of the Constitution of that city, is a distressing shock to the thousands North and South who had learned to admire his vigorous and impressive utterances on public subjects. Young, enterprising, industrious and devoted to the material advancement of his State and section, he was a type of the progressive Southern man of our day. In the face of the greatest possible difficulties and discouragements he achieved success, intellectual and financial, of a most substantial character. Mr. Grady’s career was brief and meteoric, but it was also a useful career. His strong grasp of present facts enabled him to guide and stimulate the energies of those about him into profitable channels. Full of ideas, which his intense, nervous nature fused into sentiment, he exerted an influence which greatly promoted the progress and prosperity of his section. Outside his own State Mr. Grady will be best known, however, as a brilliant and eloquent speaker. For some years past his speeches at social gatherings of a semi-public character in Northern cities have attracted a great deal of attention North and South. His earlier utterances were a trifle effusive, conceding overmuch, perhaps, under the inspiration of the moment, to the prejudices of his audience. In discussing fiscal measures he was sometimes at fault, political economy not being his strongest point, but as regards the relations of the sections, and especially as regards the so-called Southern problem, he was a beacon of light to his Northern auditors. His last speech at Boston the other day—the delivery of which may be said to have brought about his death—is a fitting monument of his genius and impassioned eloquence. It thrilled the country with its assertion of the right of the white race of the South to intelligent government and its determination never again 527to submit to the misrule of the African. Mr. Grady’s speech on this occasion was remarkable not only for its fervor and frankness—which conciliated his most unrelenting political opponents—but also for its wealth of recent fact, concisely stated and conclusive upon the point he had in view. Is the full vote, as shown by the census, not always cast in Southern elections? Neither is it cast in Northern States, Mr. Grady showed, appealing to the facts of the elections of November last. “When,” President Harrison asked in his last message, referring to the colored voter of the South—“when is he to have those full civic rights which have so long been his in law?” He will have them, Mr. Grady answered, when the poor, ignorant, and dependent employé everywhere gets his. The colored voter of the South cannot be reasonably expected, he pointed out, to exercise his civil rights to a greater extent than such rights are exercised by persons in his position in the North and West. The point of view here taken was new to Mr. Grady’s audience and new to the Northern press. The effect of his speech, as a whole, upon Northern opinion has been, it is believed, most beneficial. In the South it was welcomed as an effort to put the Northern partisan in a position to see in their true light the hardship and danger with which the South is perpetually confronted. In some remarks made later at the Bay State Club, in Boston, Mr. Grady adverted to a larger problem—one that confronts the whole country. “It seems to me,” he said, “that the great struggle in this country is a fight against the consolidation of power, the concentration of capital, the domination of local sovereignty and the dwarfing of the individual citizen. It is the democratic doctrine that the citizen is master, and that he is best fitted to carry out the diversified interests of the country. It is the pride, I believe, of the South that her simple and sturdy faith, the homogeneous nature of her people, elevate her citizens above party. We teach the man that his best guide is the consciousness of his sovereignty; that he may not ask the national government for anything the State can do for him, 528and not ask anything of the State that he can do for himself.” These views mark the breadth of the speaker’s statesmanship, and show that it embraced interests wider than those of his own section—as wide, in fact, as the continent itself. Mr. Grady died of pneumonia, complicated with nervous prostration. His early death, at the outset of a most promising career, is a warning to others of our public men who are under a constant nervous tension. Attempting too much, they work under excessive pressure, and when, owing to some accident, they need a margin of strength, there is none.

A PUBLIC CALAMITY.

At forty minutes past three o’clock on Monday morning Henry W. Grady, the distinguished editor of the Atlanta Constitution, died at his home of pneumonia. No announcement of the death of any leading man of the South has ever created a more profound impression, or caused more genuine and universal sorrow than will the sad news of the demise of this brilliant young Georgian, coming as it does when he was at the very zenith of his fame and usefulness. The death of Mr. Grady is a public calamity that will be mourned by the entire country. It is no exaggeration to say that no orator in the United States since the days of S. S. Prentiss has had such wonderful power over his audiences as Henry W. Grady. This fact has been most forcibly illustrated by his two memorable speeches at the North, the first in New York something over a year ago, the second recently delivered in Boston and with the praises of which the country is still ringing. Sad, sad indeed to human perception that such a brilliant light should have been extinguished when 529it was shining the brightest and doing the most to dispel the mists of prejudice. But an All-wise Providence knows best. His servant had run his course, he had fulfilled his destiny. The heart of the South has been made sad to overflowing in a short space of time. Davis—Grady, types of the past and the present, two noble representatives of the highest order of Southern manhood and intelligence, representing two notable eras, have passed away and left a brilliant mark on the pages of history.

Henry W. Grady was a native Georgian. He was born in Athens in 1851, and consequently was too young to participate in the late war, but his father lost his life in defense of the Confederate cause, and the son was an ardent lover of the South. At an early age he developed remarkable talent for journalism and entered the profession as the editor of the Rome, Ga., Commercial. After conducting this paper for several years he moved to Atlanta, and established the Daily Herald. When Mr. Grady came to the Constitution in 1880 he soon became famous as a correspondent, and his letters were read far and wide, and when he assumed editorial control of the Constitution, the paper at once felt the impulse of his genius, and from that day has pushed steadily forward in popular favor and in influence until both it and its brilliant editor gained national reputation. No agencies have been more potent for the advancement of Atlanta than Grady and the Constitution, the three indissolubly linked together, and either of the three names suggests the other.

As a type of the vigorous young Southerner of the so-called New South Mr. Grady has won the admiration of the country and gone far to the front, but he has been the soul of loyalty to his section, and has ever struck downright and powerful blows for the Democratic cause and for the rule of intelligence in the South. From the Potomac to the Rio Grande all over our beautiful Southland to-day, there will be mourning and sympathy with Georgia for the loss of her gifted son.

When an old man, full of years, and smitten with the decrepitude they bring, goes down to the grave, the world, though saddened, bows its acquiescence. It is recognized that lonely journey is a thing foredoomed from the foundation of the world—it is the way of all things mortal. But when a young man, full of the vigor of a sturdy life growing into its prime, is suddenly stricken from the number of the quick, a nation is startled and, resentful of the stroke, would rebel, but that such decrees come from a Power that earth cannot reach, and which, though working beyond the ken of fallible understanding, yet doeth all things well.

For the second time within the past two weeks the South has been called upon to mourn the demise of a chosen and well-beloved son. The two men may be classified according to an analysis first of all instituted by him whose funeral to-day takes place in Atlanta. Jefferson Davis was typical of the Old South—Henry W. Grady of the New. And by this we mean not that the South has put away those things that, as a chosen and proud people, they have cherished since first there was a State government in the South. They have the same noble type of manhood, the same chivalrous ambitions, the same love of home and state and country, they are as determined in purpose, as unswerving in the application of principle. But what is meant is that the material conditions of the South have changed, the economics of an empire of territory have been radically altered. Not only has a new class of field labor taken the place of the long-accustomed slave help, but industries unknown in the South before the war have invaded our fair lands, and the rush and whir of manufactories are all around us. It is in this that the 531South has changed. Jefferson Davis, in his declining years ushered into the reign of peace, was never truly identified with the actualities of the living present, in the sense of a man who, from the present, was for himself carving out a future. His life was past, and for him the past contained the most of earthly life—his was an existence of history, not of activity—he was the personification of the Old South.

Mr. Grady was too young to have participated in the Civil War. He was then but a boy, and has grown into manhood and power since the time when the issues that gave birth to that war were settled. His has been a life of the realistic present. He brought to a study of the changes that were going on around him a keenly perceptive and a well-trained mind—he studied the problems that surrounded him thoroughly and conscientiously, and his conclusions were almost invariably the soundest. He realized the importance and responsibility of his position as the editor of a widely circulating newspaper, and he was unfaltering in his zeal to discharge his every duty with credit to himself and profit to his people. He was the champion of the Southern people through the columns of his paper and upon the rostrum—and when he fell beneath the unexpected stroke of the grim reaper, the South lost a true and valiant friend, the ablest defender with pen and word retort this generation has known.

As two weeks ago the South bowed in sorrow over the last leaf that had fluttered down from the tree of the past, so to-day, as the mortal remains of Henry W. Grady are lowered into the tomb, she should cease from the merriment of the gladsome holiday season, and drop a tear upon the grave of him who, though so young in years, had in such brilliant paragraphs bidden defiance to ancient prejudice, scoffed at partisan bigotry, and proudly invited the closest scrutiny and criticism of the South. That South in him has lost a warm-hearted friend whom manhood bids us mourn.

Henry Grady is dead.

With what an electric shock of pain and grief will this simple announcement thrill the entire country. His death, following close upon the death of the chieftain of the Old South—full of age and honors, and followed to the grave by the reverential and chastened grief of a whole people—is in striking contrast and more poignant in its nature, since the young Hercules thus prematurely cut down had just sprung to the front as leader and chieftain of the New South, and was largely the embodiment of her renaissance, her rejuvenescent life and hopes and aspirations, as the other was of her dead and sacred past.

In the prime of life and the flower of robust manhood, having just signalized himself by a triumph in which all his powers of culture, talent, and patriotism were taxed to the highest and nobly responded to the demand made them, and having placed himself in the foremost ranks of the world’s great men as a splendid type of the South’s peculiar qualities, as a worthy heir of the virtues of the Old South, and as the strongest champion of the hopes of the New, his death at this time is to her a distinct calamity. And yet for his own individual fame’s sake it is to be doubted whether Mr. Grady, lived he “a thousand years, would find” himself “so apt to die,” as now in the zenith of his fame, with his “blushing honors thick upon him.”

With Burke he could say, “I can shut the book. I might wish to read a page or two more. But this is enough for my measure.”

Mr. Grady had gained the attention of the Northern ear and the confidence of the Northern people as no other Southerner could boast of having done. When those “grave and reverend seigniors” of the stern, inflexible, unemotional Puritan race, who not a fortnight since, in 533Boston’s banquet hall, wept manly unused tears at the magic eloquence and pathos of the young Southerner’s words, and fell to love him for the uncompromising truth, the manliness, the directness and the candor of them, and for the personal grace and fascination and humanitarian kindliness of the speaker—when they learn that this being, so lately among them, the chief object of their care and attention, and so sentient-seeming and bounding with life and the God-given inspiration of more than mortal vigor called genius—that this being, so gifted, so sanguine, lies cold and breathless in the chill arms of death, shall they not, and through them the great people of whom they are the proudest representatives, mingle their tears with ours over the mortal remains of this new dead son of the South, in whose heart was no rankling of the old deathly fratricidal bitterness, but whose voice was ever raised for the re-cementing of the fraternal ties so rudely broken by the late huge world-shaking internecine strife?

And shall not his great appeal—yet echoing over the country—for justice, moderation, forbearance, appreciation for the South and the social evil under which she is providentially unequally laboring to her destiny, be inerasibly impressed upon the country, coming as it does from the lips of a dying man?

In the death of Jefferson Davis the last barrier to a complete reunion of the sections was removed. In the death of Henry Grady the North and the South will be brought together to mourn a mutual bereavement. If it shall be the cause of completing the reunion of the sections, his sad and untimely death will not have been in vain.

TWO DEAD MEN.

In the early days of this last month of the year Jefferson Davis, old, feeble and weary, was lifted gently from 534this world to the other, borne across the river in the arms of Death as softly as a tired child carried on a father’s breast. Yesterday Henry Grady, a young, strong man, rejoicing in his growing strength, with the blood of life and power and hope bounding through his veins, flushed with the triumph of new and splendid achievement and returned to his home with the proud burden of fresh laurels well won, was swiftly struck down by that relentless power and taken from the world he graced and lighted, to be known and heard no more.

When Mr. Davis died the people of the South turned back to mourn, to heap high the tributes of their honor and affection on the grave wherein sleeps the representative of a cause lost except to memory, of a past gone forever. When Grady went down, a captain of the host, a leader of the present battle, fell, and along all the far-stretching lines the shock and loss will be felt.

He was happy in the time of his death—happy as is the soldier who falls in the supreme moment of triumph, when he has struck a grand and sweeping blow for his cause and the proclamation of his glory and jubilation of his comrades make music to attend his soul in its departure. He had led in the steady march of the South upward to prosperity and a high place among the peoples of the earth; his watchful eye was everywhere in the ranks; his spirit of courage and hope was felt everywhere. His voice rang out clear and stirring as the trumpet’s blare to arouse the lagging, to call the faltering forward, to fill all the air with faith in the South and the glory of her future, so that weak men grew strong in breathing it and the timid were fired with the valor of belief. He stood high and far in the front and proclaimed to all the world the spirit and the purpose of the young men of his country—the men young in heart and living and thinking in the atmosphere and light of to-day. He proclaimed it so well that the measured music of his words was heard above the clamoring of hate and penetrated the dullness of indifferent ears, moving the hearts of the people to unity and stimulating the manhood of the country 535to shake from it factional and sectional rage and consecrate itself to a common patriotism, a single love for a great Republic.

That was his work, and he died doing it as no other man had done it. He had gained his place by the power of his own strength before his years had brought him to the prime of his manhood, and he fell in it just after he had stood shoulder to shoulder and shared hearing and honors with the country’s foremost man who has occupied the country’s highest place.

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.

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 536was 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 537that 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.

HENRY W. GRADY.

Two weeks ago the people of the South were called upon to mourn the death of Jefferson Davis. An aged man was gathered to his home in the fullness of years, with his life-work done. He was the embodiment of a sacred past, and men turned with reverence to do him honor for the cause he had championed.

To-day the people again note the presence of the Great Reaper. This time a young man is cut down in the prime of life. His work lay bright before him. His face was toward the morning. The one represented all that the South had been: the other much that she hoped to be. He was the inspiration of a renewed and awakened South with a heart full of reverence and hope and buoyancy—bound to the past by tender memories, but confident of the future with all the heartiness of a sanguine nature. Possibly it was because of the progressive sentiments which he breathed that all sections and all people are to-day in grief over the gifted dead. There is mourning in every 538Georgia hamlet, such as there has been for no young man since Thomas R. R. Cobb was brought home a corpse from Fredericksburg. There are tributes of respect from Boston, where he stood last week, with his face aglow with the light of a newer life, to Texas, where last year he delivered a message of fiery eloquence to his people. It was the national feeling which Henry Grady had kindled in the South—a faith in our future, a devotion to the Union—a practical setting to our destiny—that now lament the loss of such a man, and which sends over the wires from every section of the country the words, “Untimely, how untimely!”

Henry W. Grady was born in Athens. He was but thirty-eight when he died. His father was a country merchant who kept his family in competency, and the house, where little Henry used to leave his romping playmates to read Dickens under the trees, now stands on Prince avenue, with its deep shades, its gleaming white pillars, its high fence and old-time appearance. When war came on the elder Grady went out with his company. His name now indents the marble side of the soldiers’ monument in Athens—erected to those who fell in battle. Educated at the State University, Henry Woodfin Grady graduated in 1868. In his class were Albert H. Cox, George T. Goetchius, P. W. Meldrin, Julius L. Brown, W. W. Thomas and J. H. Rucker—among the living—and Charles S. DuBose, Walter S. Gordon, Davenport Jackson, and F. Bowdre Phinizy among the dead. In college Henry Grady was more of a reader than a student. He knew every character in Dickens and could repeat the Christmas Stories by heart. He was a bright, companionable boy, full of frankness, brimming over with fun and kindness, and without a thought of the great career that lay before him. From Athens he went to Rome where he engaged in newspaper work. His letters to the Atlanta papers attracted the attention of Col. I. W. Avery, who gave him several odd jobs. There was a dash and creaminess in his sketch work which became popular at once. From Rome young Grady 539went to Atlanta, and with Col. Robert A. Alston started the Atlanta Herald.

From this time he has been a public figure in Georgia. The Herald was immensely popular. Its methods were all new. Grady widened its columns to make it look like Horace Greeley’s paper, and hired special engines in imitation of James Gordon Bennett. He made money but spent it lavishly for news. His editorial sketches were wonderfully clever. His “Last Man in the Procession,” “The Trained Journalist,” “Toombs and Brown,” attracted wide attention. But the Herald could not stand this high pressure. Under the cool, skilled management of the Constitution, Grady’s paper succumbed, and with it all of his private means were lost. The young man in 1876 was absolutely penniless. It was then his genius burst forth, however. The New York Herald ordered everything he could write. The Augusta Constitutionalist paid for his letters from Atlanta. He started a Sunday paper, which he afterwards gave up, and pretty soon he was regularly engaged by the Atlanta Constitution. During the electoral trouble in Florida, Grady kept the Northern papers full of luminous sketches about politics and fraud. Then he commenced to write up the orange interests in Florida, winning the attention of the North and attracting scores of visitors to the Land of Flowers. Next he took up bee culture and stock raising in Georgia. He made the sand pear of Thomasville famous. He revived the melon interest, and, in his wizard-like way, got the people to believe in diversified farming. There was a richness and lightness in his touch which added interest to the most practical subject. What he handled was adorned. He drew people to Atlanta by his pen-pictures of a growing town. In the Philadelphia Times of this period were fine letters about public men and battles of the war. He became a personality as well as a power in journalism. No man was better known in Georgia than Henry Grady.

Henry Grady, shortly after he left college, was married to Miss Jule King, daughter of Dr. Wm. King, of Athens. 540Two children, Gussie and Henry, bear his name. Mr. Grady’s work on the Constitution was inspirational. When he became interested he would apply himself closely, working night and day in a campaign or upon a crusade. Then he would lighten up, contenting himself with general supervision; frequently taking trips away for diversion. He was singularly temperate—not drinking wine or using tobacco; but his emotional nature kept him constantly at concert pitch. His nervous system was in perpetual strain and he sank as soon as stricken.

It was in 1877 that he made his first appearance as a speaker. His lecture that year, entitled “Patchwork Palace,” showed his fancy and talent as a talker as well as a writer. Then came his speeches in the prohibition contest in 1885. His New England banquet address in December, 1886, was his first distinctive political speech. It stamped him as an eloquent orator and made him national fame. His oration at the Augusta Exposition on Thanksgiving day last year was a perfect effort, and his Dallas address in October was a fearless and manly analysis of the race problem. It was this subject, classified and digested, that made up his Boston address, where, last week, he completed his fame and met his death. His address last year at the University of Virginia was a model of its kind.

Of late years Henry Grady had been settling down to the level of a solid worker, a close thinker and safe leader. If there was anything in his way to wide influence in earlier life, it was his irrepressible fancy and bubbling spirit. These protruded in speech and writing. But as he grew older he lopped off this redundant tegument. He never lost the artist’s touch or the poet’s enthusiasm. But age and experience brought conservatism. He became a power in politics from the day the Herald backed Gordon for the Senate in 1872. He followed Ben Hill in his campaign with great skill, and in 1880 did as much as any man to win the great Colquitt-Brown victory. In 1886 he managed Gen. Gordon’s canvass for Governor, and in 1887 planned and conducted the first successful Piedmont Exposition.

541Some may say that Henry Grady died at the right time for his fame. This may be true as to others, but not as to him. They know not, who thus judge him, what was in the man. Some mature early in life and their mentality is not increased by length of years, but the mind of our dead friend was constantly developing. The evidence of this was his Boston speech, which in our opinion was the best ever delivered by him. No man could foresee the possibilities of such a mind as his. He had just reached the table land on the mountain top, from which his mental vision could calmly survey the true situation of the South, and his listening countrymen would hear his inspiring admonitions of truth, wisdom and patriotism. Mr. Grady had firmly planted his feet on the ladder of fame. He had the genius of statesmanship, and, had he lived, we have no doubt that he would have measured up to the full stature of the most gifted statesmen whose names adorn the annals of the Republic.

In speaking of the loss to this section, we do not wish to indulge in the language of exaggeration when we say that the South has lost her most gifted, eloquent and useful son. His death to Georgia is a personal bereavement. His loss to the country is a public one. He loved Georgia. He loved the South. With the ardor of a patriot he loved his whole country, and his last public words touched the patriotic heart of the people and the responsive throb came back from all sections for a re-united people and a restored Union.

Henry Grady has not lived in vain. He is dead, but his works will live after him and bear fruits in the field of patriotism.

There was one thing about Henry Grady. He never ran for office or seemed to care for public honor. In the white heat of politics for fifteen years he has been mostly concerned in helping others. The young men of the State who have sought and secured his aid in striving for public station are many. But until last year when his own name was mentioned for the national Senate he had shunned 542such prominence. At that time it was seriously urged against him that he had never served in the Legislature and that his training had not been in deliberative bodies. But the time was coming when he must have held high public place. The Governor’s chair or the Senator’s toga would have been his in the near future. His leadership in practical matters, in great public works, the impulse he had given the people in building up the material interests of the South were carrying him so rapidly to the front that he could not have kept out of public office. But his position at the time of his death was unique. He was a power behind the throne, mightier than the throne itself. He was a Warwick like Thurlow Weed. Whether official station could have increased his usefulness is a question. Whether his influence would have been advanced by going into politics was a problem which he had never settled in his own mind. Already he had a constituency greater than that of governor or senator. He spoke every week to more people than the chief magistrate of any state in the Union. He employed a vehicle of more power than the great seal of the State. He wrote with the pen of genius and spoke the free inspiration of an untrammeled citizen. He was under no obligations but duty and his own will. He made friends rather than votes and his reward was the love and admiration of his people—a more satisfactory return than the curule chair.

And so his death, cruel, untimely and crushing, may have been a crown to a noble, devoted and gifted life. His happiness, his influence, his reputation had little to ask in the turmoil of politics. Its uncertainties and ingratitudes would have bruised a guileless, generous heart. Not that he was unequal to it, but because he did not need public office, may we seek satisfaction in the fact that he lived and died a faithful worker and a private citizen. His last plea was for the people of a slandered section—an answer to the President that “the South was not striving to settle the negro problem.” It was an inspiration and wrung praise from friend and opponent. It cost him his 543life, but no man ever gave up life in nobler cause. He lived to see his State prosperous, his reputation Union-wide, his name honored and loved, his professional work full of success, and no man has gone to the grave with greater evidences of tenderness and respect.

As Grady said of Dawson, so let us say of Grady: “God keep thee, comrade; rest thy soul in peace, thou golden-hearted gentleman!”

TRUE AND LOYAL.

Henry Grady has done as much for his country as any man, be he living or dead. He has stood by his people and their institutions, and his pen and his voice were always heard in their defence. Henry Grady died as he lived—battling for the good name of the South, and in defending his people from the slander of their enemies. In their grief over the death of this brilliant young journalist and statesman, his section will shed as bitter tears as were showered upon the bier of Jefferson Davis. One died full of years and honor—the other was cut down in the prime of manhood, and spread out before him was the brightest future ever vouchsafed to man. His loss to the South is irreparable. There is no one who can take his place.

But the beautiful traits of Grady’s character were best known to his own people. He was as true to his friends as is the needle to the pole—his hands were ever open to appeals for charity—he was loyalty itself—his heart was as guileless as a child’s and as innocent as a woman’s—his whole aim and ambition was to do good, develop his section, and stand by his people, and do manly battle for their good name and their rights.

Henry Woodfin Grady, Georgia’s bright particular genius, is dead!

A dread disease contracted in the bleak North barely a fortnight ago, cut him down ere he had hardly stepped across the threshold of what promised to be the most remarkable life of its generation. Here, in his dearly loved mother State, his brilliant mind was a source of pride to the whole people. Throughout the length and breadth of the South, which owed him incalculably much, Henry Grady’s name is a household word. And as no other Southerner, save possibly our illustrious Gordon, he had caught the ear, aye, and the heart of hearts of the Northern land. Yes, and beyond the seas his fame had gone, and in foreign climes his intellect had impressed the intellectual. To the manner born, he loved his State and his South with all the ardor of the highest type of patriot. His tongue was never silent nor his inkhorn dry when our people were aspersed. He met traducers with truths and a glittering wit which were matchless.

Grady was a genius born. His work has proved it. Ah! the sad part of it is that Death has snatched him with so much of the grand mission which was plainly his unfinished. Nature seldom endows her children with the gifts with which she favored Grady. Among modern orators he was the peer of any and his pen spoke as eloquently as his tongue. Whether at his desk or facing an audience, his thoughts found expression in a rapid, graceful, forcible style. No man was more entertaining in private life, though it must be confessed that Mr. Grady had moments when he became so absorbed in his own thoughts that he was oblivious to what was passing around him, and men who knew him not were apt to do him an injustice in judging him. His life was devoted to Atlanta and Georgia, 545and to the effacing of the sectional line which divided the South and the North. The bringing of the people of the two sections into closer relations of thought and industry was a mission which it did seem had been especially reserved for him. No man in the North has shown the breadth of view which marked this Georgian. His last public utterance attracted the attention of the English-speaking world as no other speech in recent years has done and, while the applause was still echoing from shore to shore of this continent, he was stricken.

In his chosen profession, newspaper work, Grady illustrated its great possibilities. What the elder Bennett, Thurlow Weed and Greeley were to the press of the North, Grady was to the press of the South. Public honors were undoubtedly awaiting him, and he had but to stretch out his hand.

A Roman emperor’s boast was that he found the Eternal City one of bricks and left it one of marble. Henry Grady found Atlanta an unpretentious town and literally made it the most progressive city in the South.

A GREAT LOSS TO GEORGIA.

“Henry W. Grady died at 3:40 o’clock this morning.”

Such was the brief dispatch received early yesterday morning by the Enquirer-Sun. A simple announcement of the death of a private citizen, but of one who had endeared himself to the people of his native State and the entire South, and little wonder is it that it should have caused considerable sensation throughout the city and been the cause of numerous inquiries.

The brilliant Grady dead! He who had just returned from a triumphant ovation at the North where he attracted profound attention by the delivery of one of the grandest, most comprehensive and magnificent speeches on a subject 546of vital importance to the South and the country—cold in the embrace of death. The news was so sad and unexpected that it was difficult to realize, and surprise was engulfed in one universal expression of sorrow and regret, as the full force of the direful announcement, “Grady is dead!” was impressed on the public mind.

The bright, genial, brilliant and magnetic Grady! The fearless, eloquent and talented young Georgian whose name is synonymous with that of his native State throughout this broad land; the earnest, industrious, versatile and able journalist, dead! Cut down in the very prime of life; at the very threshold of a career which held forth greater promise of fame and honors than that of any man in the State at the present moment. This knowledge adds weight to the grief that fills every heart in Georgia at the thought that Henry Grady is no more.

His death is not only a great loss to Atlanta in whose building up he had given the full vigor of his great intellect and tireless energy, the State, whose devoted lover and earnest pleader he was, and the South at large, whose fearless eloquent champion he had ever proved himself on many memorable occasions, but to the country. No man of the present age has done more to bring about a thorough understanding between the two sections than Henry Grady. While there may have been in his two notable speeches at New York and Boston some declarations in which there was not universal coincidence of opinion, either North or South, it is generally recognized that great good has been accomplished in giving the intelligent and fair-minded people of the North a clearer and better insight into Southern affairs and removing unjust prejudices. The people of the South and of Georgia owe much to Henry Grady, and will ever hold in grateful and affectionate remembrance his good work in their behalf.

Georgia has not produced a citizen who, in private station, has achieved such renown, and who has so absorbed the affections of the people as Henry W. Grady. In every city, town, and hamlet throughout the State, will his death 547be mourned, and regret, deep and universal, expressed that the State should be deprived of the services of a citizen so useful and valuable at almost the very commencement of a glorious and brilliant career.

Grady was magnetic, eloquent, warm-hearted, and impulsive, and numbered his personal and devoted friends, as he did his admirers, by the thousands. The writer had known him long and intimately, and thoroughly appreciated his kindness of heart and the strength of his friendship, and his regret at the loss of the State is heightened by the knowledge of the loss of a personal friend and associate.

The sincerity of the grief which pervades Georgia to-day is the greatest tribute that can be paid to the memory of this peerless young Georgian who, in his peculiar magnetism, was simply incomparable.

To his beloved wife and children, and his proud, fond mother, at this hour of fearful bereavement the heartfelt sympathies of the entire State are extended. May God in his infinite mercy temper the force of this terrible blow to them, and enable them to bow in Christian resignation to His Divine will.

THE MAN ELOQUENT.

In the hush of that dark hour which just precedes the dawn—in its silence and darkness, while Love kept vigil by his couch of pain and breathed sweet benedictions on his dying brow—the spirit of Henry Grady, the South’s fame-crowned son—her lover and her champion—the Man Eloquent—the courtly gentleman—whose laureled brow while yet flushed with earth’s triumphs towered into immortality—the spirit of this man of love and might passed from the scenes which its radiance had illumined to the loftier life of the world beyond.

548From city to city and hamlet to hamlet the wires flashed the sad intelligence. Men paused and doubted as the message passed from lip to lip—paused with wet eyes and wondering, stricken hearts.

The scholar closed his book and reverently bent his head in grief; the toiler in the sanctum stayed his pen and read the message with moistened eyes; the merchant on the busy mart sighed over its fatal sentences—men, women, little children, lifted up their voices and wept.

Our hearts can find no words to voice our grief for him. And how idle are all words now! Vainly we vaunt his virtues—his high nobility of soul—his talents fine—his service to the State, and all the graces rare that crowned his wondrous personality. Vainly, because these are well known to men; and that great fame whose trumpet blast has blown his name about the world, has also stamped it deeply upon grateful, loving hearts, that rise up and call him blessed.

We would stand in silence in the presence of a death like this; for the presence of the Lord is there, and the place is sacred. The hand of God is in it: This man, who, though he had reached the heights, was but upon the threshold of his brilliant career—this man, elected to a high and noble work, to whom we had entrusted the future of the South, and sent him forth to fight her battles with the world—in the morning of his days, in the midst of his great usefulness, flushed with the triumphs of his last and mightiest effort; with the applause of thousands ringing in his ear and the “well-done” of his people crowning all—suddenly, and without warning, renounces his worldly honors—lays down the burden which he had but taken up, and sighs farewell to all!

We cannot understand it. The reality is too much!

549But God reigns, and in the mystery of His providence willeth all things well. Grady is dead. “He has fought a good fight; he has finished his course; he has kept the faith!” A hero, he died at his post; in the full blaze of his fame, with the arms of the South around him, he breathed away his life upon her breast. Could man desire more?

The South will miss him long and sorely. There is no man to take his place; to do that high, especial work which he has done so well. Aye! miss him, sweet South, and shed for him your tenderest tears of love, for he loved you and gave himself for you—he laid down his life for your sake! And you, ye sons and daughters of the South! if ye can see his face for weeping, draw near and look your last! And let the North draw near and clasp strong hands of sympathy above his bier!

Farewell to thee, comrade! Knightly and noble-hearted gentleman—farewell! The fight is over—the victory won, and lo! while yet we weep upon the field deserted, a shout rings through the portals of the skies and welcomes the victor home! And there, while the lofty pæan sounds from star to star, thy peaceful tent is pitched within the verdant valleys of eternal rest!

DEATH OF HENRY W. GRADY.

Georgia mourns for one of her most distinguished sons. Henry W. Grady, who, a week ago last Thursday, held entranced, and at times moved to enthusiastic applause, by his eloquence, an audience composed of Boston’s prominent citizens, and whose name on the following day was on the lips of millions of people, is cold in death in his Atlanta home. He died before he had reached the meridian of life or the zenith of his fame. His mind was steadily broadening, and he was constantly giving evidence of the possession of still greater ability than he had yet displayed. 550In his Boston speech he handled the race question in a way that showed that he was not a mere rhetorician, but a genuine orator, who could direct the minds of men as well as touch their hearts and dazzle their imaginations. Had he lived, he would have won a name that would have had a permanent place in the history of his country. As it is, he will be remembered as a brilliant young man whom death claimed before he had time to show that he was fully capable of meeting the expectations which were entertained with regard to him.

Mr. Grady was full of resources and a tireless worker. He entered the profession of journalism very early in life, and such was the energy and intensity with which he devoted himself to it, that even if he had not possessed extraordinary talents, he could hardly have failed to succeed; but, having a special fitness for his work and ability of a very high order, it was not strange that he quickly made a reputation that was not confined by the lines of his State.

Mr. Grady was never satisfied with what he had accomplished. He felt that he was capable of still better things, and he strove constantly to reach a higher mark of excellence. No sooner was he done with one undertaking than his busy brain was engaged with another; and it can be said of him that his aims were not selfish ones. No doubt he had the ambitions which every man of marked ability has, but the good of others entered largely into his thoughts and plans. Atlanta owes to his memory a debt she can never repay. During all the time he was a resident within her limits he kept her interests steadily in view. He contributed to her prosperity in a hundred ways, and when her people were lukewarm in enterprises which he or others suggested, he pointed out to them their duty, and urged them to perform it so eloquently and strongly that they fell into line and won success when many thought success was impossible.

Mr. Grady was not apparently anxious to accumulate wealth. Money did not remain with him long. His purse 551was always open to his friends, and those who had claims never had to ask him twice for assistance when he was able to render it. Doubtless there are hundreds in Atlanta who are able to speak from personal knowledge of his free-handed liberality.

Mr. Grady never held public office. Had he lived, however, it is probable that he would have entered the political arena. He was gradually being drawn in that direction, and during the last two or three years his name was frequently mentioned in connection with the offices of Senator and Governor. His triumphs were won as a journalist and an orator. In the latter character he first achieved a national reputation at the dinner of the New England Society in 1886.

Georgians loved Mr. Grady and were proud of him. The death of very few other men could have so filled their hearts with sorrow.

HENRY W. GRADY DEAD.

The flash that announced over the wires the death of Henry W. Grady shocked the country, for it was a national calamity.

It is seldom that a people are called upon in so short a space of time to mourn the loss of two such men as Jefferson Davis and Henry W. Grady. The first was a blow for which we were prepared, for like ripened grain, Mr. Davis fell, full of years and honor, before the scythe of the reaper; but the death of Mr. Grady comes to us as a sorrow with all the force of a painful surprise. He was cut down in the bloom of a robust physical manhood, in the full enjoyment of his magnificent mental powers by which he had just ascended to the very pinnacle of fame. The eyes of the country were fixed upon him, the son of the South, whose transcendent genius inspired the hope of the blessed realization of promises with which his brief but 552brilliant career was so full. But in the death of this illustrious journalist and matchless orator the lesson is enforced that “The path of glory leads but to the grave.”

Mr. Grady grew up in the refined atmosphere of cultured Athens, and his mental nature treasured the classic light of that seat of learning, and it glowed with attractive radiance in all of his editorial work. In his death the press of the country loses its brightest ornament, and the South loses a champion without compare, whose pen was a trenchant blade in fighting her battles, and a shield when used to defend her from the hurtling arrows of envy and malice. His luminous pen made the path of the South’s progress glow, as with unflagging zeal he devoted his best endeavors to the amelioration of her war-ruined condition.

Mr. Grady, as the representative of what people are pleased to call the “New South,” but which is the “Old South” rehabilitated, was, in the providence of God, calculated to do for his country what Hill, Gordon and other brilliant lights of the old régime could never have compassed. As David, “the man of war,” was not permitted to build the temple, but that glory was reserved for Solomon, so Grady, the exponent of present principles, was permitted to gather the fragments and broken columns of the South’s ruined fortunes and begin the erection of a temple of prosperity so grand in proportion, so symmetrical in outline, as to attract, in its incomplete state, the admiration of the world.

In the extremity of our grief we are apt to magnify our loss, but this, indeed, seems irreparable, and we can take no comfort in the assurance of the philosopher who codified the experience of the past into the assurance that great ability is always found equal to the demand. On whom will Grady’s mantle fall? There really seems to be none worthy to wear what he so easily graced. And every Southern heart weighed down with a sense of its woe cannot but ask,

Henry W. Grady is dead!

Hushed forever is the voice of the South’s most wonderful orator!

With the laurel upon his brow, with the plaudits of a nation ringing in his ears, with the love of his people freshly spoken, with a crown of glory about him, the matchless defender of the South has passed from earth, and beyond the silence of the stars his soul dwells in the companionship of the great who have gone before.

With his sorrow fresh upon the South, this death and loss following so closely upon that other in New Orleans but a few days ago, the heart is not in keeping with the brain, and not now can the pen dipped only in tears write.

Henry Grady had not reached the zenith of his fame, for the circle was widening for him and there were still brighter flowers for him to pluck, and in her hand Honor held out still richer prizes. But the mystery of death is upon him, and from his hand has dropped the forceful, graceful pen, and in silence and peace he sleeps for the grave.

With a superb intellect, with an eloquence rivalling the golden-tonged Chrysostom, with a love almost unapproached by any other for the South and her people, he stood peerless and matchless as his land’s defender and leader in all that made for her peace, prosperity and happiness.

But his sun has set. It matters not that in all brightness it went down; it matters not that he died full of honors; about that grave a people will gather with tears fast flowing and hearts crushed and bleeding. It is hard to give up one so grand of mind, so wonderful of tongue, so magnetic of personality, so richly endowed in all that equips the great leader.

554And such was Henry W. Grady.

Atlanta will mourn him, Georgia will weep for him, and the South will sorrow indeed.

Upon his bier the Times lays this tribute and stands reverent and uncovered by the grave of Georgia’s most brilliant son.

A SHINING CAREER.

Henry Grady is dead. This announcement carried sorrow all over Georgia yesterday, for there were few men in whom the people of this State felt so much interest or for whom they cherished such a warm affection as they did for this gifted and lovable man. He had not attained his thirty-ninth year when “God’s finger touched him” and closed his remarkable career, but his name was familiar from one limit of this Union to the other. Georgia had no more famous citizen, and perhaps there never was a man in this State in private station who was so widely known or so much admired. Mr. Grady never held a public office, and yet he was a recognized force in Georgia politics almost before he had reached the years of statutory manhood. He devoted his life to journalism, and in his chosen field achieved a national fame. He began his career as a boy editor in Rome, and at an age when most men are merely selecting their standards and shaping themselves for the real work of life, he became a prominent and influential figure, a leader of thought, and a promoter of public enterprises. Eighteen years ago he moved to Atlanta to pursue his profession in a broader field, and immediately made himself felt as a positive force in the community. The debt which Atlanta owes him is great indeed. No man did more to inspire the pride of community, to set on foot and carry to success great enterprises for the welfare and progress of the city, to rally its people to an enthusiastic unanimity on all 555questions affecting local prosperity than did Henry W. Grady. These public services would have endeared him to the people of his adopted city, but they were not so admirable as his private benefactions. He was first and foremost in many good works, the fame of which never went beyond the homes of the poor and unfortunate who were relieved by his ministrations. His hand was open always to the stricken and needy. He gave to the afflicted with a generosity which was oblivious to his own circumstances. Of his influence in promoting public enterprises there are enduring monuments. By his eloquence of tongue and pen he raised in less than two weeks $85,000 for the erection of the beautiful Young Men’s Christian Association building which now adorns one of the principal streets of Atlanta. He was the moving spirit in the building of the Chamber of Commerce and the enlargement of its membership until it reached proportions that made it a power not only in matters of business but in all the public concerns of the city. The Confederate Soldiers’ Home of Georgia is a monument to him, for he seized mere suggestions and made them the text of an appeal which stirred the hearts of the people of Georgia and evoked a long delayed tribute of gratitude to the broken veterans of the lost cause. The Cotton Exposition of 1880 and the Piedmont Expositions of 1887 and 1889, from which Atlanta reaped immense benefits, were largely due to his persistent labors.

While Mr. Grady became prominent in Atlanta, and justly esteemed by his fellow-citizens on account of works and triumphs like these, he rose into national prominence by reason of other evidences of his genius. His address to the New England Society in New York in December, 1886, was one of the most famous occasional speeches ever delivered in this country. The morning after its delivery he literally awoke to find himself famous throughout the country. Since that time he made various public addresses which commanded the attention of the United States and became subjects of common conversation among the people. His speech at the Dallas Exposition last year and his 556address to the legislatures of Georgia and South Carolina at the Augusta Exposition a few weeks later, were themes of the public press of the entire country. But the best and ablest public speech of his life was his last. It was that which he delivered two weeks ago at Boston in the performance of a mission which proved fatal to him. In this, as in all his famous public addresses, he seemed to strive with a passionate ardor and a most persuasive eloquence to bring the North and the South to a better understanding of each other, to foster the spirit of mutual respect and mutual forbearance, to inculcate the great idea that this is a re-united country and that the duty of every good citizen in its every section is to strive for its domestic peace, for its moral, social and material progress, and for its glory among the nations of the earth. He handled these great themes with a master hand and invested his exposition of them with a most fascinating eloquence. Few men in Georgia ever accomplished so much in so few years. Few men in Georgia were even the object of such affection at home and such admiration beyond the bounds of the State. The career which has been so suddenly cut off was shining with golden promise. The future seemed to be full of honors and there was everything surrounding the present that could make life sweet. But the end has come. The most eloquent tongue in Georgia has been smitten into everlasting silence in this world. A great, generous heart has been stilled.

A useful citizen, after a brief but busy and momentous life, which was productive of many enterprises of public importance and beneficent tendency, has folded his hands in the eternal rest. God’s peace be with him!

Can it be possible? Can it be that the brightest star in the galaxy of our great luminaries is blotted out and stricken from its orbit just as it was rising in full career to the zenith of usefulness, influence and splendor? Can it be that the most brilliant meteor which has flashed across our sky for a generation has fallen to earth literally burned to ashes by its own fiery contact with the grosser air and elements of the natural world? Can it be that the light has gone out of the most magnetic mind and the spirit gone from the most resistless personality in this sovereign State? Can it be that the South has lost the man who has been first and foremost in representing its real and progressive needs and issues, and who has done more for this section than all the young men of his day combined? Can it be that the kindly heart has ceased to beat which throbbed in love first for a devoted family, and next and always for his native State?

Even so, for while still the shadows of the night hung in mournful pall about his home and dawn lingered as if loth to look upon the lifeless form of one whom all his people loved, his spirit soared away to greet the dawning of an eternal day and the mortal part of Henry Woodfin Grady lay cold in death.

Dead, did we say? Was ever the coming of Death’s angel more untimely? So it seems to us, with our poor mortal vision, but there is an eye above, all-seeing; a Providence, all-timely; a Power, almighty; and to His will we bow this day. In His sight the stricken star is not blotted out but borne aloft to a brighter realm. In His providence the brilliant meteor of a day is not fallen, but simply shorn of all its dross and burnished in beauty and splendor for its flight through all the ages. In His power the spark which no longer animates the mortal man glows again in glory and sends a ray of loving light from Heaven 558to cheer and console the broken hearts on earth, and remind us that his influence and work are not lost, but will live and bear blessed fruit for generations yet to come.

Henry Grady has gone from earth ere yet the dew of youth has been drunk up by the midday sun of maturity, but in the brief span of life allotted to him what a world of work he has done, and what a name he made for himself! Not two-score years had passed over his head, and yet he had attained all the substantial success and honor which mortal man might wish. He was not only loved all over Georgia, but he was famous all over the country, and no public occasion of national import was deemed complete without his presence and his eloquent voice. He was a magician in his mastery of men, and the witchery of his voice was enchantment to any audience in any section. He was coming to be regarded as the representative of the whole South in the editor’s chair and on the rostrum, and it is truly said of him that he has done more for the material advancement of this section than any other man for the past fifteen years. His death is the greatest calamity which has befallen the South since the late war, and Israel may indeed mourn this day as for her first-born.

The name of Henry W. Grady will not be forgotten, for it will live in the affectionate regard of Georgians and grow greater in the good results which will follow his life-work. The fact that he literally died in the service of the South, as a result of cold contracted just after the impassioned delivery of his recent grand oration in Boston, will bind his name and memory nearer and dearer to Southern hearts; for to warrior or hero was never given a better time or a nobler way to die than to the man who gave his voice, his heart, his reputation and his life to healing the wounds of a fratricidal war, and to the harmonious building up of his own beloved South as the fairest and richest domain of our common country.

God bless his name and his memory, and be a strong and abiding support to his broken-hearted widow and household this day!

A great loss has befallen the South in the death of Henry W. Grady, and deep sorrow rests upon the hearts of her people.

He was no ordinary man, and his death calls forth no ordinary grief. Brilliant in intellect, strong in his convictions, untiring in his efforts to promote the welfare of his country, genial, courteous, kind-hearted, ever ready to help the unfortunate, the loss of such a man cannot be estimated. When results were to be achieved, when encouragement was needed, his eloquent tongue, his ready pen, his helping hand were used with telling effect. His creed was to build up and not to tear down; to encourage and not to discourage; to help and not to hurt. His efforts were ever directed to the promotion of his State and the South, and no other man has accomplished so much for them as he. His last effort was for his country and his people, and the good which will result from his eloquent speech at Boston, will be a lasting monument. It would have been impossible for any man to have attained to Mr. Grady’s position without coming into contact with those who disagreed with him on many points, but even these acknowledged his greatness. To read of him was to admire him; to know him was to love him. In the midst of our sorrow let us thank God that He lends to earth such men.

A PLACE HARD TO FILL.

Henry W. Grady died at his home in Atlanta late Sunday night of pneumonia, contracted during his recent trip North. His illness was very short and his untimely 560death is a shock not only to his many friends and admirers, but to the whole State in which he was so well known, and will be received with regret outside its borders. He was a beautiful writer and a brilliant orator, as well as a prominent factor in the development of Atlanta. He will be greatly missed in that city, and his place in the Constitution, of which he was easily the head, will be hard to fill. Peace to his ashes.

“JUST HUMAN.”

Thackeray, the greatest of English novelists, in the concluding words of Pendennis, says: “I have not painted a hero, only a man and a brother.” When Henry W. Grady made his first appearance before the public as a lecturer, his subject was the words that begin this article—“Just Human.” This was years ago, when he was only known to the world as a brilliant young journalist, and even then his fame for quick perception, incisive utterance and felicitous manner, was only begun. Later years added to that fame, and with each year, there seemed to come to him a wider range of ideas, and a bolder conception of the most effectual way to put those ideas into burning, glowing language.

After he had made his memorable speech before the New England Society in New York, each succeeding one only raised him higher in public esteem as a matchless, a magnetic orator, who could wield human hearts as he would. Through all these speeches, and in all that he ever wrote, there lingers, like a sweet incense, this thought, that he recognized that men were “Just Human,” and entitled to all that charity could offer in extenuation of their faults.

There is not a heart in all the world that has received one pang from aught that Henry Grady ever wrote or said; 561his utterances, whether from the rostrum or through the columns of his paper, always tended to make the world better, and his ambition seemed to be to smooth away the differences that annoy, and the bitternesses that gall. There is no man in all the country that can take up his work where he left it.

Where can we find the same impassioned eloquence that swayed, despite its force, as gently as the summer breezes that come across fields of ripe grain?

Where can we find the same acute feeling for the sorrows and sufferings of men and women, “Just Human,” the same sweet pleading for their extenuation or their amelioration?

When the epitaph over his grave comes to be written, no better rendering of the true greatness of the departed could be made than is contained in the suggestive name of his first lecture, “Just Human,” for the noble instinct that taught him to plead so eloquently for the failings of his fellow men, taught him to enter the Divine presence, asking for himself that mercy he had asked for others.

GEORGIA WEEPS.

Hon. Henry W. Grady, of the Constitution, died at his home in Atlanta this morning at 3:40.

This cruel blow shivers every heart with agony, even as the thunderbolt of heaven rends the mighty monarch of the forest.

His death is a loss to Georgia. Every man feels it as a personal bereavement. He has done more for the material development of the State than any other one man in it. He was an enthusiast in the cause of education, an upholder of the church, an advocate of industrial training, a promoter of every enterprise calculated to benefit Georgia and 562her people. He was a friend to humanity, true to himself, to his country and to his God.

The most brilliant light in Southern journalism is veiled in darkness—a manly heart has ceased to beat; the tongue that has electrified thousands with magic eloquence is silent forever; the fingers that wielded the pen of genius and never traced a line in bitterness or malice, but was always uplifted in behalf of charity, love and good will, in behalf of progress, industry and enterprise, in behalf of the South and her institutions, his State and her people, are cold in death; the once warm hand of benevolence and fraternal greeting is chilled forever; a golden life is ended, but his works live after him, as a priceless heritage to his State, a boon to his people. The influence of his example pervades the State as a delightful aroma.

The dispensations of Providence are mysterious. It is strange fate, past all human understanding, why so excellent a spirit, a man of so much influence, should be cut down in the glory of his life, in the richest prime of his royal manhood.

Only a few days ago he stood in a blaze of glory in a Northern city and electrified thousands by his matchless oratory, in the presentation of a question that did the South great good and justice, and did much to soften the animosities of the North toward the South, and establish more fraternal relations between the two sections. But even while the plaudits of the admiring multitude were ringing in his ears, and the press of the country was singing his praises, the fatal hand of disease was laid upon him, and he was brought back to his own sunny and beloved Southland to die.

Mr. Grady was a popular idol. He was destined to reap the highest political honors in the State. His name was being prominently mentioned in connection with the Governorship and Senatorship of Georgia. Democratic leaders sought his favor. His influence was felt throughout the entire State. His support was an omen of success.

Ben Hill died, and his place has never been supplied in 563Georgia. Mr. Grady approached nearer to it than any other man. Now Mr. Grady is gone, and his duplicate cannot be found in the State. No man in recent years could so attract the eye and fasten the attention of the North. The death of no other Georgian at this time would have been so calamitous.

The star was rapidly hastening to the zenith of its brilliancy and greatest magnitude when suddenly it went out in darkness, but across the industrial and political firmament of the country it has left an effulgent track whose reflection illumines the world.

A GRAND MISSION.

So much has been said about the lamented Grady that we may not be able to offer anything new. But as we feel that his untimely death is an irreparable loss we must offer our heartfelt tribute.

He was the most unselfish slave to friends, and to duty. As an editor he was brilliant and at all times as fearless as a Spartan; as an orator, age considered, he stood without a peer within the broad realm of his native land, and although but in the full vigor of manhood he has left upon record speeches that compare favorably with the master efforts of Calhoun and Webster. As a companion he was genial, jovial and untiring in his efforts to entertain; as a friend there was no bound to his fidelity.

If you would know the beauty and grandeur of Henry Grady’s character, go and learn it at the homes of poverty where he delighted to turn in the light, by his many offices of love and charity. If you would know the kindness of his generous heart go to those whom he has lifted from the vale of poverty and given encouragement to look up. Ask the army of newsboys for a chapter upon the life of Henry 564Grady and you will hear words to convince you that a philanthropist has been called hence. It seemed to us the other day while in Atlanta, as they said “Paper, sir,” that there was a sadness in the tone, and that a great sorrow was upon their hearts. Yes, those newsboys miss Henry Grady, for he was their friend and protector. Words of eulogy cannot restore those who cross the dark river; if they could there has been enough said to recall Henry Grady to the high position he honored by a life of unselfishness. His mission, only begun, was a grand one, and we trust his mantle may fall upon some one who will carry on his work.

THE SOUTH LOVED HIM.

Seldom has the nation’s heart been so saddened as by the news of Henry W. Grady’s death. Henry W. Grady, although comparatively young, has conquered this vast continent—east and west, north and south—and his many victories have been bloodless. He has truly demonstrated that the pen is mightier than the sword. An intellect exceptionally brilliant, an indomitable courage, a judgment keen, clear and cool, a character unspotted and unassailable—these are the weapons with which Henry W. Grady captured the nation.

The South loves him for his unflinching devotion to its interests; the North admires him for the conservatism which always characterized his political actions. The brilliancy of his intellect all admit. We venture to say that there lives not a man in the United States to-day whose death would be more sincerely or more universally mourned.

That a career so unusually promising should have been so suddenly cut off is sad indeed—sad especially for the South, whose claims he so ably advocated and so successfully furthured. The severing of the still more tender ties 565between wife and husband, mother and son, while in the youth of his glory, adds another gloomy chapter to the death of Southland’s most patriotic and brilliant son. Millions will bow their heads in grief with the loving wife and devoted mother.

We read and re-read the words of Henry W. Grady’s last speech with a strange fascination. They are like the last notes of the dying swan and will doubtless have much more weight under the sad circumstances. He has literally laid down his life that the colored man might enjoy his in peace and prosperity.

NO SADDER NEWS.

No sadder news ever fell upon the ears of this people than the announcement that “Henry Grady is dead!” It staggered our people like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky.

His death took place at the family residence in Atlanta at 3:40 o’clock Monday morning, December 22. While on a visit to Boston, where he delivered the grandest speech of his life, he took cold, and being ill before he left home, he was prostrated on his return home, his sickness culminating in pneumonia and death. He was thirty-eight years old at the time of his death, and no private citizen at that age ever attained the renown that Grady had. As an orator and journalist he was without a peer; gifted above his fellows to sway men by his pen or his voice, he won the applause and admiration and love of his countrymen wherever he came in contact with them. His young life and genius had been devoted to deeds of kindness, peace, unity and charity. Selfishness did not enter his heart, that always beat in response to the woes and sufferings of his fellow men.

There was a charm and sparkle about his writings that 566never failed to captivate the senses, please and entertain. The South lost one of her brightest minds and stanchest champions in the death of Henry Grady. There is no man that can take his place in the rare gifts that so befittingly endowed him in the grand work in which he was engaged. His loss is an irreparable one. Sorrow and gloom pervade the hearts of our people over this sad event. We may not understand how one so superbly gifted, with capacities for the accomplishment of so much good in the world, is taken, and many who cumber the earth and are stumbling blocks, are left, but we know the hand of Providence is behind it all, and He is too wise to err, too good to be unkind.

Grand and noble Grady, we mourn your death; but we know a soul so radiant with love for humanity, is now at rest with the redeemed.

GEORGIA’S NOBLE SON.

In view of the innumerable, heartfelt and touching memorials to this gifted child of genius, anything that we might add would be as Hyperion to a Satyr. But moved by a feeling of profound grief at our’s and the Nation’s loss, we claim the privilege of giving, as humble members of the craft, expression to our high regard for the character of Georgia’s noble son, and mingle a tear with those of the entire country upon the grave of a great and good man.

In early life he manifested a ripeness and decision of purpose in selecting a calling for which he conceived he had an aptitude. Nor was his judgment erroneous, for, with rare genius, coupled with energy and untiring application, he soon found a place amongst the first journalists of the country. How, with his gifted pen, he convinced the judgment, moved the emotions and sympathies, inspired 567to lofty resolve and the cultivation of gentle kindness, none knew better than his constant readers.

Perhaps no character in Georgia, we may say in the South, was possessed of such varied, versatile talent. Profuse in rhetorical attainments, gifted in oratory, profound in thought, facile and versatile as a writer, an encyclopædia of statistics, he presented a combination amounting to an anomaly. Coming upon the stage of action at a period when the crown was torn from our Southland and she bent beneath the cross, when the gore of his patriot father, poured out on the fields of Virginia, was still red before his vision and calling as it were for vengeance, he remembered the vow of the greatest Captain of the age, taken at Appomattox, the injunction of our recently departed Chieftain, and set his noble brain, gifted pen and silver tongue to the herculean task of extinguishing the embers of sectional hate; to a recognition of the rights, and adjustment of the wrongs of his beloved South, and the rehabilitating of the great American nation, under the ægis of constitutional equality.

His strong and graceful effusions in the Atlanta Constitution had attracted universal attention, and put men everywhere to thinking. Blended with so much of genial kindness and courtesy, while abating nothing of truth or right, they won commendation, even from unwilling ears. Nor were they confined to one theme. Every work of industry, labor, love or charity found in him a potent advocate, convincing by his logic, and persuading by his gentle, finished rhetoric. As a journalist, among the craft and the world of readers, he was recognized as without a superior, scarcely with a peer.

But burning with a grand, great purpose, he felt with the inspiration of true greatness, that there was work for his tongue, as well as pen. With a penetrating judgment, he felt that the territory of those misguided and uninformed as to the condition and burdens of his beloved South must be invaded, and the ear of those who read but little or nothing of her grievances must be reached. Unexpectedly 568an opportunity was opened up for him, and he appeared before a cultivated audience in the great metropolis, New York.

To say that wonder, admiration and conviction was the result of his grand effort on that occasion, would be to put it mildly. Never, since the surrender, have any utterances, from any source, commanded, up to that time, so much attention and attracted so much careful and unprejudiced consideration of the situation of the South. From the position of an accomplished journalist, he bloomed out into a grand orator. His name and his grand effort was on every tongue, and every true Georgian thanked God that a David had arisen to battle her cause.

So profound was the impression made upon the Northern mind of the justice, truth and temperance of Mr. Grady’s position, that he was called to Boston, the cradle of Phillips, Garrison and all isms, to discuss the race question. Had his people been admonished of the consequences to him physically, they would have felt as did others in reference to the sweet singer of Israel—better ten thousand perish than he be endangered. Intent upon what he believed his great mission, he responded. What that grand effort was is fresh in the minds of all. Its influence upon this Nation, time alone will disclose.

Grand as was Mr. Grady as a writer, thinker and orator, his greatness culminated in the bigness of his heart. He might truthfully be called (as he styled the late Dawson) “the Golden-hearted man.” His pen, tongue, hand and purse were ever open to all the calls of distress or want, and every charitable movement found no more effective champion than in him. A striking recent incident is narrated of him illustrative of this his noble characteristic. Taking two tattered strangers into a store, he directed the proprietor to furnish each with a suit of clothes. The proprietor, his close personal friend, remonstrated with him for his prodigality, saying, “You are not able to so do.” He replied, “I know it, but are they not human beings?” Grand man. Surely he has won 569the crown bestowed upon the peacemaker and the cheerful giver. Mysterious are the ways of the Great Ruler. Little did his exulting friends think that he would be so soon summoned from the field of his glory and usefulness to the grave. Man proposes, God disposes, and Grady sleeps the long sleep, but “tho’ dead he yet speaketh.” Alone, aided by none save perhaps the gifted, battle-scarred, faithful Gordon, he gave up his life to enforcing the obligation of Lee, the injunctions of the lamented Davis. With a brave spirit and a heart of love, he would speak words of forgiveness to his wrong-doers, if any, while others less tolerant might say to them, “An eagle in his towering flight was hawked at by a mousing owl.” But with indorsement from such as Cleveland, Hill, Campbell and a host of others, he needs no apology from us. Peacefully he has crossed over the river, and under the perennial shade of the leal land he sits with Davis and Lee and receives their plaudits for his faithful, patriotic efforts.

THE DEATH OF HENRY GRADY.

Henry W. Grady died at his home in Atlanta, at 3:40 o’clock, on the morning of the 23d ult.

This announcement has already been flashed all over the United States, and has carried genuine sorrow throughout Georgia and many places beyond. The fame and the popularity of this brilliant young orator and writer were not confined to this State, but were almost co-extensive with the limits of the Union.

Mr. Grady was in Boston a week or two before his death to make an address, by invitation of the Merchants’ Club of that city. The address was on “The Negro Problem,” and it attracted attention throughout the United States. He was not well when he left Atlanta, and his departure 570was contrary to the advice of his physician. Immediately after the address, he went to New York, and while there he had to take his bed. He was compelled to decline all the honors tendered him, and hastened home. The citizens of Atlanta had arranged a complimentary reception for his return, but he was taken from the car into a carriage and carried to his home. He never left that home until he was carried out in his coffin.

His funeral took place on Wednesday of last week. It was probably the largest that has ever been seen in Atlanta, for Mr. Grady was nearer and dearer to the popular heart than any other man. The body was carried to the First Methodist church, where it lay in state several hours. Thousands of people passed through the church and took a last look at the face which was so familiar to all Atlanta. The church was profusely and beautifully decorated.

At two in the afternoon the funeral took place. There was no sermon, but the services consisted of prayers, reading selections from the Bible by several ministers, and songs. “Shall we gather at the river?” was sung as the favorite hymn of the deceased. At the close of the services, the remains were placed in a vault in Oakland Cemetery.

Henry Grady was a remarkable man. He was not quite thirty-nine years of age, had never held an official position, and yet his wonderful talent had won for him a national reputation. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that, as an attractive writer and speaker, he had not an equal in the United States. Certainly he had no superior. He spoke as well as he wrote, and every utterance of his tongue or production of his pen was received with eagerness. There was an indescribable charm about what he said and wrote, that is possessed by no other person within our knowledge.

He began writing for the press when about eighteen, and at once made a reputation throughout the State. That reputation steadily grew until he could command an audience that would crowd any hall in the United States.

It is impossible to estimate the good he has done. At one time he would use his wonderful eloquence to urge the 571farmers of Georgia to seek prosperity by raising their own supplies. At another time, he would rally the people of Atlanta to help the poor of the city who were suffering from the severity of the winter weather. Then he would plead—and never in vain—for harmony among the distracted factions of his loved city, who were fighting each other in some municipal contest. Still again, he would incite his people to grand achievements in material prosperity; and who can measure the value which his influence has been to Atlanta in this particular alone? He often said to his people “Pin your eternal faith to these old red hills”; and he set the example.

But his work was not confined to the narrow limits of his city and State. He was in demand in other places, and wherever he went he captured the hearts of the people. His speeches and his writings were all philanthropic. All his efforts were for the betterment of his fellows. In the South he urged the moral and material advancement. In the North he plead, as no other man has plead, for justice to the South and for a proper recognition of the rights of our people. The South has had advocates as earnest, but never one as eloquent and effective.

In the prohibition contest in Atlanta two years ago, Mr. Grady threw his whole soul into the canvass for the exclusion of bar-rooms. With his matchless eloquence he depicted the evils of the liquor traffic and the blessedness of exemption from it. If reason had prevailed, his efforts would not have been in vain; but unfortunately the balance of power was held by the ignorant and the vicious—by those on whom eloquence and argument could have no effect; and he lost.

But his life-work is ended, except so far as the influence of good works lives after the worker dies. He has done much good for his State and for the entire country; and there is no man whose death would be more lamented by the people of Georgia.

Atlanta buried yesterday her greatest citizen, and Georgia mourns the death of her most brilliant son. Not only Atlanta and Georgia bewail an irreparable loss, but the whole South joins in the lamentation, while beyond her boundaries the great North, so lately thrilled by his eloquence, stands with uncovered head at Grady’s tomb.

O measureless sorrow! A young man, with unequaled genius and great, loving heart, has been cut off in his golden promise. The South saw in him her spokesman—her representative to the world. The old and the new were happily blended in him. Revering the past, his face was turned to the rising day. As the stars went out, one by one, he greeted the dawn of a grander era, which he was largely instrumental in hastening. His work for Georgia, the South, the country, will abide. Time will only increase his fame.

A journalist without a peer, an orator unsurpassed, a statesman with grasp of thought to “know what Israel ought to do,” has fallen. Words are impotent to express the public grief.

God reigns. Let us bow to His will and trust Him for help. Our extremity is His opportunity. If leader is necessary to perfect the work, He will give us one qualified in all respects. Like Moses, the South’s young champion had sighted the promised land and pointed out its beauties and glories to his wondering people. Let us boldly pass over the Jordan that lies between.

Rest, noble knight. Dream of battle-fields no more—days of toil, nights of danger. Thy country will take care of thy fame.

Together with the sorrow of the thousands who loved Henry Grady that he should be taken from among them, comes the lament of the Nation that one so gifted and capable of so much good should be cut down just as he was fairly upon the threshold of his useful career. Viewing the surroundings from a human standpoint, it would seem that his end was indeed untimely and a calamity to the whole Nation.

Our own Colquitt and Gordon have won greatly the respect of the Northern people, but they nor any Southern man had as implicitly their confidence. Whatever Grady said or wrote, on no matter what subject, our friends across Mason and Dixon’s line accepted as utterly true and not to be questioned. They respected also his ability more than they did any other man of this section, and were more inclined to take his counsel and be governed by his advice and admonition.

This distinction Grady had honestly won, and by having it he was doing more than any ten men to obliterate sectional prejudices. His last great speech, delivered only a few days before his death, was on this line, and its good effects will be felt the country over, though he has been taken before he could see them. In that speech he disabused the minds of his hearers of many erroneous ideas of the relations of the races in the South. He did it by stating plainly and unhesitatingly facts and giving a true picture of the situation without varnish. He had the gift of doing this in such a way as to command the respect of both sides of whatever question he might be discussing. Just such speakers and just such speeches is what is now needed to bring the two sections together; to obliterate sectional prejudices; make the entire Nation one people in purpose and sentiment. But have we any more Gradys to make them? Perhaps 574so, but they are in the background and time must elapse before they can reach his place. We need them in the front and on the platform now. Grady was already there, and was doing perhaps, as no other man will ever do, what is urgently needed to make the Nation more harmonious, more peaceful and more prosperous; and while we must bow in humble submission to the will of the Higher Power which saw fit to end his career, we can but lament the evident loss the people of the South especially, and the whole Nation, sustains.

HE LOVED HIS COUNTRY.

In the death of Henry W. Grady, Georgia loses one of her most gifted sons. Though but a young man he had already acquired a name that will live as long as Americans love liberty or humanity loves charity. Though in point of years but just above the horizon of fame’s vast empyrean, his sun shone with the splendor and brilliancy usually reached at the zenith. As journalist, he was without a peer in his own loved Southland. As orator, none since the death of the gifted Prentiss had, at his age, won such renown. He loved Georgia, he loved the South, but his big heart and soul encompassed his whole country. As patriot, his widespread arms took in at one embrace the denizens upon the borders of the frozen lakes and the dwellers among the orange groves that girt the Mexic sea. He gave his life away in a masterful effort to revive peace and good will between sections estranged by passion and prejudice, and races made envious of each other by selfish intermeddling of those who would perpetuate strife to gratify their own greed. As neighbor and friend, those who knew him best loved him most. Wherever suffering or poverty pinched humanity, there his heart beat in sympathy and there his hand dispensed charity’s offerings 575without stint. Though we have differed with him in many things, the grave now holds all our differences and our tears blot out the bitterness of words or thoughts of the past. May the God in whom he trusted dispense grace, mercy and peace to the widow and orphans, whose grief and sorrow none but they can know.

A RESPLENDENT RECORD.

It is almost impossible to realize that Henry Grady is dead; that the eager, restless hands are stilled, and the great heart pulseless forevermore. The soul turned sick at the tidings, and a wave of anguish choked all utterance save lamentation alone. His people mourn his passing with one mighty voice, and like Rachel weeping in the wilderness, refuse to be comforted.

It seems a grief too heavy to be borne, and as lasting as the everlasting hills; but when time shall have laid its soothing hand upon our woe, there will succeed a sensation of exultance and exaltation, the natural consequence of a contemplation and appreciation of the briefness and brilliancy of his course, and the proportions and perfection of his handiwork.

To few men has it been given to live as Grady lived; to still less to die as Grady died, in the flush flood-tide of achievement, laying down sword and buckler, the victory won, and bowing farewell while yet the thunder-gust of plaudits shook the arena like a storm. He flamed like a meteor athwart the night and vanished in focal mid-zenith, leaving the illimitable void unstarred by an equal, whose rippling radiance, flashing in splendor from its myriad facets, might gladden our sublimated vision.

And what of good he accomplished, all his claim to renown, and the sole and simple cause of endearing him to 576mankind, rested upon one trait alone, one Christ-like attribute and actuating motive. He held but one creed and preached but one gospel—the gospel of love. “Little children, love one another,” said, now nearly a score of centuries since, the carpenter of Nazareth, and with this text—this first and greatest and most divine of all the commandments—for a wizard’s wand, our modern Merlin unlocked hearts and insured the hearty clasping of palms from one end to the other of this broad land.

What more resplendent record could man attain? What prouder fame be shouted down the ages?

His epitaph is written in the hearts of his people. His memory is enshrined in the love of a nation.

Let us leave him to repose.

DEDICATED TO HUMANITY.

The usual joyous season of Christmas tide has been saddened by funeral dirges over the loss of Georgia’s gifted son. Since the death of the eloquent and lamented Ben Hill, the loss of no man has aroused deeper sorrow than Henry W. Grady. Greater demonstrations of grief with all the emblems of mourning were perhaps never before exhibited in Georgia. Memorial services were held not only in Atlanta, the city of his home, but throughout the State, voicing the great love of the people and their deep sense of the magnitude of his loss. More touching, beautiful eulogies and panegyrics have perhaps never been pronounced over the bier of any man.

The intensity of the admiration for Henry Grady grew out of the fact that his grand powers were all dedicated to the interests of humanity. His magic pen, that charmed while it instructed, that delighted while it moved, was laid under contribution to the good of his fellows. Eager for 577the development of his State and her resources, he traversed the lowlands of the South, and depicted her vast possibilities in the cultivation of fruits, melons, etc., that have added so much to her material wealth. Turning to the rock-ribbed mountains and hills of North Georgia he pointed out the vast treasures of iron ore, marble and coal, but waiting the hand of industry. In all sections he portrayed their resources, their fields for manufacturers, the importance and value of increased railroad transportation—in fact, leaving nothing undone that seemed to promise good and prosperity to his people.

The sunny heart which he always carried into his labors was his chief charm. The playful yet ardent spirit which he always had he seemed happily to be able to impart to others. Indeed, he seemed to be a gatherer of sunbeams, his blithe spirit seemed to sing,

The sweet, pacific tone of his mind gave him a wonderful influence over the masses. More than once when disturbing questions were agitating the city, and party and personal feeling ran high, has he by his conciliatory spirit and harmless pleasantry quelled the boisterous multitude. This spirit was ever fruitful of methods and concessions by which all could harmonize. It was the cropping out of these broad, liberal views in the fields of national patriotism that arrested the attention of other sections of the Union, and gave rise to calls for Grady to address the people at the meeting of the Historical Society in New York over two years ago. The eloquent utterances of the young orator, as he painted the Confederate soldier returning from the war, ragged, shoeless and penniless, fired the Northern heart with a sympathy for the South it had never known before.

From this time his fame as an orator was established, 578and he was at once ranked among the greatest living orators of the day.

Thoughtful men of the North, recognizing the race problem as one of the coming momentous issues of the future, were eager to hear the broad views and patriotic suggestions of this great pacificator. An invitation was there extended by the Merchants’ Association of Boston to address them at Faneuil Hall. The address seemed to call forth all his capacious powers, and is styled the crowning masterpiece of his life. As he graphically sketched the happy results of the sun shining upon a land with all differences harmonized, with all aspirations purified by the limpid fount of patriotism, he sketched a panorama of loveliness and beauty and promise that enraptured his hearers. And as the notes of the dying swan thrill with new melody, so the last utterances of the dying statesman will have now a new charm for those who loved him.

THE SOUTH LAMENTS.

One week ago yesterday morning woe folded her dark and gloomy pinions and settled over our fair and sunny Southland! He, who by his love for us, by his incessant labor for the advancement of our material progress, whose voice was raised to dispel the shadows of hate and prejudice, and bring the North and South into a closer union, whose heart was filled with charity, and whose hands were ever performing deeds of kindness, the eloquent and gifted Grady—the knightly and chivalrous leader of the peaceful hosts of the New South—was called to a brighter home in the skies, where all is peace and joy and supernal bliss. The whole South laments his death “and may his soul rest in peace” is the sentiment of every heart. His virtues are sung in sweetest song, and his worth proclaimed by lips 579tremulous with emotion. Young in years, but matured in wisdom, he grappled the great question that affected his people, and with matchless eloquence presented their cause on New England soil and told of their loyalty and love, still cherishing and remembering the traditions of the past. His death everywhere is recognized as a national calamity. Every public utterance and every public appearance, whether in New York, Boston, Texas or on his native soil, amid “the red old hills of Georgia,” has been greeted with applause and demonstrations of delight. Made fatherless in youth by the cruel ravage of war, he struck out with a stout heart and strong hands for success—how well he achieved it, the praises showered upon him from every quarter forcibly demonstrate the fact! Who has not felt the warmth of his sunny nature?—it glows in every stroke of his pen, and shines in all his eloquent utterances, and brightens his memory as his name and triumphs pass into history. Mr. Grady, by his pen and eloquence, has done more for the South than any other of her sons, and their love and appreciation is attested in their universal sorrow. His gifts were rare, his eloquence wonderful, and he bore in honor and peace the standard of his people, and they will ever keep his memory fresh and green.

HIS CAREER.

Only a few short weeks ago Hon. Henry W. Grady left his Atlanta home to electrify a critical audience in Boston, Mass., with one of his inimitable speeches. Through all the papers of the country the fame of this magnificent address went ringing, and ere the speech itself was printed, in full, the orator from whose lips it fell was stricken with a fatal disease on his return homeward. In little more than a week his life’s sands had run their course, and in the flush 580of a glorious and useful manhood Henry Grady lay dead, while his eulogies were on the lips of the whole nation. There has been much written by friends (he had no foes) in the newspaper world concerning this great loss; but it is all summed up in the words, “Henry Grady is dead!”

Somewhere, in an English poet’s writings, we find a pregnant little sentence: “I stood beside the grave of one who blazed the comet of a season.” The career of Henry Grady has been likened by several speakers and writers to a star burning brightly in the national and journalistic sky, but its light quenched in the darkness of death ere it reached its zenith. Fittest, it seems to us, is the simile quoted previously. A comet trailing its brilliant light across the darkening heavens, a spectacle focussing the gaze of millions of eyes, causing other stars to sink into insignificance by reason of its greater glow and grandeur.—Then, while the interest concerning its movements has reached its intensity, its gleaming light fades, and presently the sky is merely glittering again with the myriad stars, for the flash and the blaze of the comet have disappeared forever and it is invisible to mortal eyes. The question is, will another take its place, and when?—We think not soon. Even should an orator, whose eloquence might sway multitudes, rise to reign in the dead hero’s stead, it is more than probable that he would not combine with his oratory the wonderful statistical knowledge possessed by Mr. Grady, whose solid reasoning was only exceeded by the winsome touch, creeping in here and there, of the true artistic nature. He spoke in his last address of the South’s vast resources—of its “cotton whitening by night beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locking the sunshine in its bearded sheaf.” A practical argument at one turn and a beautifully rounded sentence at another.

These things made up the speeches that held so many in breathless attention, augmented by his magnetic personality. It would be well for our Southland could another as gifted shine forth in like splendor.

We little thought in our last issue for the old year, when we penned a brief paragraph to the effect that Mr. Grady had returned from his brilliant triumph in Boston to his home in Atlanta sick with a cold, that in a few hours afterward his grand spirit should have winged its flight to the home beyond, and that upon the Christmas day, when the glad bells should ring out their joyous message of “Peace on earth—good will to men” in the great city so much of his own making, that instead they should toll the sad requiem of “Dust to dust,” and that every heart from the ragged newsboy to the chief magistrate should be bursting with anguish as the noble form of their idolized leader was consigned to the cold, silent grave.

The blow came so suddenly and was so totally unexpected, that it spread consternation—not only in his own beloved State and Southland—but over the entire country. Was there ever a man so universally loved with so brief a career! Was there ever a man so sincerely and widely mourned! Was there ever a man so grandly, so eloquently eulogized! Never have we seen anything like it—never have we heard of anything like it; nor do we believe there was ever a parallel.

But all the panegyrics by passionate lips uttered, nor all the burning words of eulogy by eloquent pens written, have yet expressed the tremendous weight of sorrow that oppresses the hearts of the people who loved him so well. This was indeed a time when strong men of mighty mind and fluent tongue felt the utter poverty of expression and the inadequacy of words.

It did appear as if he was just entering upon his glorious career,—as if his life’s work yet lay out before him. And yet what a glorious, what a grand work he had done! And may not his death have emphasized his glowing appeals for 582a broader charity; for an unquestioning confidence; for fraternal love and justice; for a re-united country. In our very heart we believe so. If not—God help our country!

We will not attempt to eulogize Henry Grady—to speak of his brilliant intellect; of his matchless eloquence; of his spotless character; of his great, warm, unselfish heart—that has already been done by those better fitted for the loving task; but the hot tears blind our eyes as we think of the handsome, boyish form of the peerless Grady lying cold in the remorseless embrace of death. Peace be to his precious ashes!—Eternal joy to his immortal spirit!

A DEATHLESS NAME.

There was buried in Atlanta yesterday a young man that illustrated the possibilities of American youth.

There are two forces that combine to make great men—heredity and environment. The first had given Henry Grady magnificent natural endowment—a kingly and masterful mind. The second gave him opportunity, and he utilized it for all it was worth. Combined, they have given him a deathless name and fame that will make one of the brightest pages in the Southland’s history.

All over the land, men and women, who loved his sweetness of soul, grieve to-day over his untimely end. All over the South, men who expected much of his tongue and pen, mourn sincerely the loss of the brilliant mind which worshiped so loyally at Patriotism’s altar. How illy could he be spared. How inscrutable the ways of Providence! We can but bow and grieve.

But what an inspiration the history of his brief years! Poor and unknown a few years ago, he died in a halo of glory that had made his name a household word over a continent. His life was a psalm of praise. Like the birds, he sang because he must. Eloquence dwelt in his tongue 583like the perfume in the heart of the flowers; sweetness flowed from his pen as the honey comes from the mysterious alchemy of the bee—it was his nature.

This is not the time or place to analyze or measure his life-work. History and the future must render that verdict. Frankly, we are not of those who believe that his speeches—eloquent and grand as they were—will wipe out sectional feeling. The people who hate and fear the South are given over to believe a lie. It is their stock in trade; it is the life blood of their political partisanship, and though one rose from the dead, they would not believe. But he had done and was doing, and had he lived would have brought to a marvelous fruition something of far more practical value. He had made known to the world the marvelous resources of the South, and gotten the ear of capital and enterprise and brought, and was bringing, the enginery of its power to unlock the storehouses of an untold wealth. ’Tis here his grandest work was done. Call it selfish, if you will, but ’tis here our loss is greatest.

His brilliancy, dash and originality had made the great journal, of which he was the head, easily the foremost newspaper of the South. His eloquent tongue and matchless pen had made him par excellence the exemplar and apostle of this grand and growing section.

But the end has come. Only He who has smitten can know whether such another prophet shall rise in the wilderness to lead us forward to the glorious destiny which his prophetic eye foresaw, and to which his throbbing, loyal heart gave itself and died.

A GREAT SOUL.

A great soul has passed away.

After a life brief but brilliant, he is lost to the country that loved and honored him, and which his lofty eloquence and pure patriotism have illustrated and adorned.

584As the lightning that comes out of the South, and flashes from horizon to horizon, so was his short life in its bright, swift passage, illuminating the earth.

In the death of Henry Grady, his city, his State, the South, the whole country has suffered a great loss. His voice was ever the ringing, stirring herald-tones that announced the promise of fairer days and a happier people. He was no low-browed, latter-day prophet of evil; but preached here and everywhere the new and bright evangel of hope. He was the voice of his city, heard ringing through Georgia and the Union; the voice of his State, heard clarion-like from ocean to ocean, and the golden-mouthed messenger from the South to the North, proclaiming a brotherhood of love that the shock of war had not destroyed. And thus his death will be mourned, not in Atlanta or in Georgia only, but wherever an American heart is, that heart will mourn his death.

Particularly is Mr. Grady’s death a loss to journalism. He stood the peer of any in the world, and was the greatest journalist in the South. His pen was as eloquent as his tongue, and from the closet as well as from the platform his words came with vivifying power, refreshing and inspiring.

Death struck him down from the lofty pinnacle of fame, to which his eloquence had so swiftly upborne him. A young man, he had already reached a height that would have dazzled a weaker soul, and he has fallen in the midst of his triumph, while yet the plaudits of tens of thousands from every part of this country rang fainter and fainter on his dying ear. It was something worth to have such heartfelt approbations sounding around him as he sunk to his last sleep. It was the crowning of a life well lived, and spent with lavish patriotism for his country’s weal.

He burned his life to the socket like a swift devouring flame. His energy was tremendous, and almost feverish in its eagerness to do something worth the doing. He returned to his city and his home with death upon him, stricken even in his great triumph. The glow of fever followed 585hard upon the glow of victory, and so, after a brief and burning life—a life crowded thick with triumphs, “God’s finger touched him and he slept”—the sleep He giveth to His beloved.

Of his private life all may speak. We know it well. It is familiar to us all as household words, though his charity and his kindness were without ostentation. He was generous without stint, and whether it was as the boy making up a fund to buy a poor schoolmate a handsome suit to graduate in, or as the man lending a helping hand to lift or guide the needy, self was forgotten in his kindness to others. In thousands of homes he will be

His city, his State, and his country will build for him a shaft, but his greatest monument will be in the hearts that mourn his death.

A great and loving soul has passed.

IN MEMORIAM.

The public heart, still quivering and aching from the shock occasioned by the death of its venerated and talented leader, Jefferson Davis, had its cup of woe and grief filled to overflowing by those words of doom—“Henry Grady is dead.” In the natural course of events, the first catastrophe was one that might have happened any time in the past ten years, as the great Confederate chief had long since passed the limit of three-score-and-ten, the average limit attached by Biblical authority to human life. Mr. Davis descended to his grave full of years and honors, and while he was universally and sincerely mourned in the South, still, it did not fall upon us with that electric suddenness 586which so shocked and agonized the Southern heart as when our young Demosthenes became a victim to the fell destroyer.

So universal is this sorrow, that a separate and personal bereavement could not have more completely shrouded in grief the public mind than did the announcement of his death. The advent of the dark angel into each and every household could not have more completely paralyzed the public mind than did the untimely taking off of this superbly gifted son of Georgia. Never since the angel of the Lord smote the first-born of Egyptian households for lack of mystic symbols on the door, has a people’s sorrow been so deep, so universal, and so sincere. Had the end of such a man come in the proper course of nature, heralded by such physical changes as indicate the approach of death, it might have been better borne, but would still have been an event of national misfortune that would have taxed to the uttermost the endurance of hearts already lacerated by freshly opened wounds. Had we been in the possession of such warnings as it was in the power of Omnipotence to have granted us, still the blow would have been unutterably painful and overpowering. But that he, who was conceded to be the intellectual peer of any in the nation; who was without a superior as an orator in the present generation; that he who was in an especial manner fitted to be the champion of the South in her appeal for justice at the bar of public opinion, both in Europe and America; that he, who was so richly endowed should suddenly and without warning, as it were, become the victim of death, and have all the bright and brilliant promise of a life whose sun had risen so gloriously, quenched in death and darkness, might well move a people to tears, and clothe a nation in sackcloth and ashes.

The people of the Southland are wrapped in grief and a nation mourns in sympathy. While all nature beams with beauteous smiles and December luxuriates in the balmy breezes of spring, he whom we had learned to love and to whom his people turned for hope and encouragement, lies wrapped in earth’s cold embrace. Henry W. Grady is dead. Early Monday morning his brave spirit forsook its earthly tenement and sought Him who had given it being. The electric words which flashed the sad news through the length and breadth of the country carried mourning into thousands of homes and millions of hearts. The friend of the people was dead, and one universal sense of sorrow pervaded the minds of all.

Mr. Grady had just returned from Boston, where he had delivered one of the grandest addresses of his life, before the Boston Merchants’ Association, upon the Southern question. The speech was thoroughly Southern in its character, and a grand defense of the course of his people in national politics and their dealings with the colored race. Exposure in the raw New England atmosphere caused him to contract a severe cold which rapidly grew worse. He was very ill when he returned to Atlanta and pneumonia in its worst form soon developed. He lay ill at his beautiful home in Atlanta for a few days only, gradually growing worse, until the end came Monday morning.

Though his dangerous situation was known, the probability of his death did not seem to occur to the people. That the youthful, magnetic, beloved Grady could die seemed impossible. When the blow had fallen its effect was to stun, and had we been told that it was a dream, a mistake, we would really have believed it and sought out some new evidence of his popularity. Dead! Is it possible! Before he had reached the prime of his manhood or 588the zenith of his fame! Did Death but waylay to seize him just as we were learning his worth? Of the many mysteries of life death is the greatest.

Nothing shows more the high estimation in which the man was held than the widespread sources from which came the words of sympathy and condolence; from field and fireside, from town and hamlet, from city street and mansion, from every source in which his noble words have found an echo, poured forth the gentle words of sympathy and sorrow. Statesmen and soldiers hastened to proffer their sympathy and great men of every rank condoled with the bereaved ones. Not a prominent Northern journal but devoted considerable space to his memory. Party and creed were alike forgotten. Not a whisper of depreciation was heard from any source.

There never died a man within the history of the State whose fame was so recent, who was so generally loved and admired in life and so universally regretted in death. On Christmas, the day of joy and peace, we laid our hero to rest. Not the less a hero because his were the victories of peace. No victor, fresh from the bloody field of battle, was ever more deserving of his laurel wreaths than he of the chaplets we can only lay upon his grave. The lips that pleaded so eloquently for peace and union are stilled in death, and the hand that penned so many beautiful words for the encouragement of his people moves no more. A sense of peculiar personal loss is upon us. The old men have lost a son, the young men a brother. Atlanta mourns her foremost citizen, the State a devoted son, the South an able defender and the Nation an honored citizen. Our matchless Grady is no more.

Henry W. Grady is dead. His great soul has passed from this mundane sphere. Truly “a silver tongue is hushed and a golden pen is broken.” Matchless orator, brilliant journalist, able statesman, patriotic citizen, noble man—shall we see your like again!

When Stonewall Jackson fell fighting for the land he loved, the Confederacy lost her great right arm, and never recovered from the blow. So, in these post-bellum days—in times of comparative peace—but under anomalous and trying conditions—the South loses her ablest leader, and at a time when his services seem most needed, and when he was doing that service so nobly and well. The death of Mr. Grady in ’89 compares only, in the Southern estimate, with the loss of Jackson in ’63. Viewed from the natural side of human wisdom, his death, in the words of the great Republican orator of New York, is a national calamity.

This young man, from obscurity and poverty, by the sheer force of his genius, sprang easily and early to a national celebrity which few dare hope for, and fewer still attain in the generations of men. He was both brilliant and practical, both gentle and wise. He would build a factory or a railroad, or found a great exposition, as easily as he would deliver a bright oration. He would counsel with statesmen with the same tact and ease that he would go gunning with the young men of the town. When he touched a man he made a friend.

The writer, who would pay this short and poor tribute, knew him for eighteen years. He has seen him from many points of view—mostly as an opponent in State politics, but always as a friend. In his office at work—at his private board—in the political caucus—on an angling or gunning expedition—his transcendent genius always shown with a rare and radiant light. To these who have known 590him well he has long been the man the world has recently found him to be—one of the greatest men of his time; to such his loss is felt as a personal bereavement. Each one, when his name is heard, will recall some word or deed to cherish as a fragrance from the tomb. Such memories will be treasured in the hearts of many, from Grover Cleveland to the saucy newsboys who cry the Constitution on the streets of Atlanta.

But to abler pens, and to those who have known him longer and better, the task is left to pronounce a fitting eulogy.

Of his life and his death, much space is ungrudgingly given elsewhere in this issue of the Times. Let the young men of the country read, and learn of him who has passed away at thirty-eight years of age and left the impress of his genius upon the greatest Nation of the earth.

“MAYBE HIS WORK IS FINISHED.”

Henry Woodfin Grady died Monday morning, December 23, 1889, from bronchial and other troubles, irritated by his recent visit to Boston, where he made his last and greatest speech in behalf of the section and people he loved so well.

Since England lost her Wellington, and America her Lincoln, no greater calamity has moved a people to sympathetic tears than the death of Henry Grady. His life was the fulfillment of a noble man, and his grand impulses touched every phase of humanity. No man was ever better known to his country by an unbroken chain of rarer virtues, nobler purposes, and more powerful capacities. His work, in whatever field, was the impetuosity of patriotism. His successes stand as a mark of indomitable energy. Possessing an extraordinary faculty of grasping opportunities at 591the full flood tide, he illustrated the perfect patriot in forgetting self for common good, the genuine friend in bestowing his own advantages to others. Only he that worthily lives, in death enshrines himself in the hearts of his people, and not a wire in all the network of commercial arteries but that has given, in messages of love, cadences of a country’s sorrow. When poets and patriots are met at the bier by the hushed voices of the rabble, and commerce pauses to pay tribute, Heaven-blest must be the spirit that gives flight from earth. In all the walks of life Henry Grady has left remembrances that suggest homage to his worth.

But his name shall occupy a space in history, filling the brightest niche of an illustrious age, that his life shall stand out boldly in the perfect beauty of its accomplishment.

There is a touching coincidence in his death, following so closely after that of Jefferson Davis, that the funeral dirge of one almost blends into the decadence of the other, giving figure to an illustration as true as it is sublime.

Who can refute the suggestion that it was a wise decree of Providence, staying the relentless demands of Time that sectional prejudice might lose its forceful resentment, lending ear to the vigorous mind of Davis, through the very nobility of his after life; and giving communion of perfect sympathy through the pleading of Henry Grady, caught up as if from the living embers of the old, a fair type of that historic period, imbued with all the demands of the present, his patriotic ardor glowing with fire of eloquence, his dying speech giving tumult of enthusiasm in voice of advocacy, expounding reason indorsed by every Southern man?

No man better knew the temper of his people, or gave thought with riper philosophy to the issues which surround them; or was less fearless to speak the truth.

As a common country gave applause to the logic of the living, may we not trust in the prophecy of the mourning mother, that the work for which he gave his life, in unmurmuring sacrifice, is truly accomplished?

There is such pathos in the incident of this last grand 592effort to break the cordons of estrangement between the sections as may justify the hope.

The South, undemonstrative, unprejudiced, unyielding furthermore, pleads for no fairer basis.

HE NEVER OFFENDED.

He died peacefully at his home in Atlanta on Monday morning at forty minutes past three o’clock. As the news flashed over the wires it imparted a thrill of anguish to every Southern heart. For he was a great favorite at the South. And at the North he had cause to be proud of his reputation. It would be impossible to compare Mr. Grady with any man who has lived. His character was unique and so was his work. It is idle and senseless talk to conjecture what his future might have been if he had lived. His course is run and his life is finished, as completely finished as if he had lived an hundred years and died. What was that life? Grady was a big-hearted, whole-souled fellow, a man of the people, a statesman and a patriot. His intellectual attainments and all fitted him for the grand and brilliant position which he reached. True as steel to his native South, he was able to conciliate the North. A man of noble impulses, he never offended. In sober truth he was a great man, and accomplished a great work which will live after him and glorify his name.

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 594were 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.

STRICKEN AT ITS ZENITH.

On the mild Christmas morning the heart of Georgia is bowed in sorrow over the death of her favorite son. It seems, indeed, a mockery that amidst the joys and festivities of the Christmas time, the dark shadow of the relentless foe of man should intrude his presence and take from our land one who was its brightest hope, its strongest support!

And yet it is true. Henry Grady is dead! The orator, the journalist, the poet by nature, the man of the people, is dead! We cannot realize it. So bright in his strong young manhood but one short week ago, now folded in the arms of death! A greater shock, a keener sorrow was never crushed upon a people!

This is not the time, in the shadow of the grave but in the brightness of his glory, to speak fully of him that is gone! Our pen fails, and all it can say is “Thou has stricken Thy people, O God! and in Thy wisdom Thou hast given us bitterness to drain! Let not our hearts rebel against Thee, our Lord and our God!”

The death which has come to Georgia to-day cannot be measured in its irreparable loss. A week ago the South was in mourning over the death of her great leader! But he belonged to the past, and while the sorrow fell deep, yet we realize that a life had ended which had filled its fullest 595mission. But in the death of Henry Grady the South has lost a leader of to-day—an active, earnest, true man, whose heart, bound up in the advancement of his people, was but laying brighter and fresher and truer plans for their prosperity. To every heart in the South the question comes “Who will lead us now? Who will defend our principles now that he is taken from us?” And out of the blackness of our desolation it seems that no star shines to guide us!

It is, perhaps, well that the last effort of Mr. Grady was in defense of our institutions and in support of the principles, motives and ambitions of his people. He died with the gathering halo of a people’s love clustering about him! He went to death with a defense of that people clinging to his lips and to his heart! In the zenith of his usefulness he was cut down! Why? God in His infinite wisdom knows best!

We can pay no tribute to the memory of Henry Grady greater than the love which weeps at his bier this morning. And yet the writer would lay, amidst the offerings which fall from the overflowing hearts of thousands to-day, a tiny tribute to his memory. He was our friend, wise and true and earnest in his counsels—pointing out that the true end of the journalist is the defense and advancement of his people. As a journalist, perhaps, has his greatest work been done, and upon the heart of every man of the pen he left an impression that his vocation is ennobled and is the grander that Henry Grady made it his love. And, in the shadow of death will come this consoling thought. That the press, which was his power, and which remains as the bulwark of the people, is the purer, and the better, and the stronger from the principles which Henry Grady inculcated in it. To carry out that work, which has fallen from his hands in death, should move the heart of every journalist, and when its fullest fruition has come, then will the crown upon the fame of Henry Grady shine the brighter!

Peace to the great man gathered to his reward! The future will crown his memory with the bright flowers which will come as the fruition of his hopes and of his life-work!

The brilliant young editor of the Atlanta Constitution entered into rest eternal and closed an earth-life remarkable for splendor at 3:40 o’clock yesterday morning. His brief career reflects not only glory upon his name, but also crowns with unique distinction the high profession of journalism. A noble representative of the grand old State of Georgia, the lustre of his life-work was reflected upon the commonwealth he served and to whose honor he consecrated the ripeness of his learning, his eloquence and his patriotism.

His harp hangs now mute upon the willows! No more shall the soul and intellect of the thoughtful North or South, in New York, New England, Texas or Georgia, be stirred to the depths by his impassioned words or impressed by his unanswerable logic. “The silver cord is loosed, the golden bowl is broken.” But the music his harp evoked is not dead and shall long linger a sweet song in many hearts, and his works do follow him.

He was born in Athens, Ga., in 1851, and though a man of well ripened powers, had not reached that prime when a strong man’s capacity for labor is most highly tested.

He was educated at the State University, and afterward pursued a post graduate course at the University of Virginia, where so many noble characters have been molded.

Here the orator and scholar grew and nature’s rare gifts were fused and refined in the crucible of mental discipline. The studies which specially attracted him and in which he excelled, were Greek, Anglo-Saxon, history and belles-letters. Thus, evidently a most copious vocabulary was created and the mind stored with fertile illustrations in the department of history and general literature. In the happy use of words, in graceful rhetoric he was not surpassed by any American of his day. Roscoe Conkling or Col. Ingersoll might be compared to him, but the former had not 597Grady’s tact, neither his full vocabulary, and never treated the difficult and delicate topics Grady handled. And Ingersoll, though having remarkable power of language and an accomplished rhetorician, had not the logical mind of the brilliant young Georgian, and tinges his best efforts with bitterness and cant.

Grady was natural, even-tempered, generous, warm-hearted. His end came after the greatest effort of his life. His Boston speech will do an inestimable benefit to the South at a time when, under President Harrison, the bitter and partisan spirit of the Republicans was leavening much of the thought of the North. Mr. Grady addressed Northern people from the home of Phillips and Sumner, and his words have rung from Boston to San Francisco. His great speech was susceptible to no criticism for taste, for loyalty to our convictions, for impressive oratory or convincing argument. His facts and his logic are as strong as his word painting.

His beautiful tribute to the land which “lies far South” is a literary gem not destined alone to stir the hearts at the time of its utterance. It will live for its poetry, its tender sentiment and its reality.

If our friends across Dixie’s mythical line are but moved to do justice to a long suffering people, and trust us for loyalty to settle our peculiar problems, Grady has not lived in vain and will be the great apostle of his age.

Lay him gently to rest then, Georgians, in this sweet Christmas time, while the bells are chiming the notes of his Savior’s birth, and cover his grave with holly, mistletoe, and ivy, until the Master comes in glorious majesty to judge the world, and earth and sea give up their dead.

600

ATLANTA CONSTITUTION BUILDING.

THE Atlanta Constitution came into being in the seething chaos of reconstruction. The name suggests the issue of which it was born and the cause which gave it life and strength at the beginning of its career. Georgia was being reconstructed under military supervision, against the will of a vast majority of the people, and there was no journal published in Atlanta which gave adequate expression to the sentiment of a million people. The old Intelligencer, which had been the clarion of war times, was no longer equal to the emergency. It had bravely breasted the storm of war, dodging about between bomb-shells and issuing forth defiant, one day in one town and one day in another, sometimes even setting up its press in a box car. But for the more trying times of reconstruction it was not adequate. The fiery tone and dauntless attitude were gone and it began to counsel for the things that were. While the people were idolizing Ben Hill for his superb defiance and applauding the unreconstructed and unterrified Toombs, there was no paper to voice the deep and unconquerable sentiment against reconstruction and for the re-establishment of the State constitution.

It was then that the Constitution appeared. When Messrs. W. A. Hemphill and J. H. Anderson bought a little sheet called Public Opinion, and put Colonel Carey Styles in charge as editor, he named it The Constitution, and the name became its shibboleth and its issue. The editor was a bold and fearless writer and a fiery and impetuous orator. His editorials glowed with defiance of the reconstructionists, and his speeches were iridescent with burning denunciation. Writing and speaking on the side of the people, he made the paper immensely popular, and 602the enterprise of the proprietors kept it rolling on the crest of the tide.

From the first the Constitution was a more enterprising news-gatherer than any of its contemporaries. It was the first to employ special correspondents in all parts of the State and the South. The system which has since become comprehensive and well-nigh perfect was then in its beginning, but it was something new in Georgia, and attracted attention. It was in this way that Mr. Grady was employed to go with the press excursion which passed through North Georgia, looking and writing to the development of the resources of the State, and his “King Hans” letters on that trip gave the first news from the important points of the excursion.

In those early days the Constitution was not without literary attractions. The associate editor with Colonel Styles was Mayor J. R. Barrick, a genial gentleman, much beloved by his acquaintances and known to the public as a scholar and poet. He had been a protégé of George D. Prentice, who had recognized in the young man literary talent of no common order.

In those days editorials were of the first importance. The State was being reconstituted, and great questions that went down to the foundations of government were being discussed. The orators of the day were Ben Hill, Toombs, Alexander Stephens, and scores of lesser but not inconsiderable lights. Speeches were matters of vital importance to newspapers and the public, and the leading orators were always stenographically reported. The modern synopsis would not then suffice. There were giants in those days, and the people hung upon their words; their utterances must be given in full. Editorials must rise to the same level, and great questions must be handled with the same dignity and earnestness. Men were not too busy to think and read, and they demanded mental pabulum that was strong and rich. Talent was at a premium, and its services easily commanded good pay. The owners of the Constitution were the first to realize the priceless value of 603Mr. Grady’s genius, and when he was yet a college boy under age, Mr. Hemphill, who had lived in Athens, where Mr. Grady grew up, made his guardian a proposition to buy an interest in the Constitution for Mr. Grady on condition that he should take the position of managing editor. From then until Captain Howell employed him in 1876, the Constitution never lost sight of Mr. Grady. While attending the University of Virginia he contributed to the paper, and on his return he was engaged by the editor to represent the Constitution on the press excursion referred to above.

The mechanical appliances of Southern newspapers at that time were vastly out of proportion to the matter then carried. The Constitution was born and swaddled in a store-room on Alabama Street. It was a long room with a skylight, and printer’s cases were arranged along the wall on either side. In front was the business office, and in one corner a little room was partitioned off for the editors. There was a freemasonry between printers and editors, and the whole force glowed with enthusiasm for the cause which was epitomized in the paper’s name.

After reconstruction became a fact the State swarmed with aliens, and the people were goaded to fury under negro and carpet-bag government. The Capitol was infested with unknown men suddenly thrust into power, and they carried extravagant measures with a high hand. A Republican Governor was in office, and the venerable Secretary of State, Colonel N.C. Barnet, lately deceased, had gone out, carrying with him the great seal of the State, which he refused to allow affixed to any official act of men ushered into office by the military authorities. The State was involved in lottery schemes and loaded down with railroad bonds on which Treasurer Angier, a sturdy Republican, had refused to put his signature. The sessions of the Legislature were held in a great opera house sold to the State by private parties for an enormous price. In the building was a restaurant, confectionery shop, and velocipede rink. It was a scene decried, and the proceedings of the Legislature 604were daily denounced by the press and people. Among the boldest and most scathing critics of those disgraceful transactions was the Constitution, and its editor in his public speeches smote the participants hip and thigh. The fight was on for the redemption of the State, and it was waged without ceasing till the yoke was thrown off and a Democratic Governor was elected in 1872. In all that fight the Constitution was the leading newspaper, and from the beginning the battle was waged with the uncompromising fervor that had characterized its opposition to the reconstructionists. In both these contests it was with the people, and in its columns they found free and full expression. The bitterness of those days has died out, and many of the sturdiest opponents have become friends; differences of judgment have long since been allowed admissible, but the friendships cemented in the heat of those contests are deep and abiding, and for its gallant services then the Constitution is still endeared to the people of Georgia.

With the redemption of the State from negro and carpet-bag rule, there was no local political issue of transcendent importance. The State was safe, and people began to look about and take account of what was left from the wreck of war and reconstruction. The country was in a deplorable condition, and its rehabilitation almost a work of despair. In the midst Atlanta had begun to rise out of the ashes, and the brave spirits that gathered here had already made a name for the new city, which began to be looked upon as something more than a Phoenix; but all around was desolation. The plantations were in a deplorable condition, fences were rotting, and houses were going to decay. The first flush times of peace and greenbacks had passed, and the panic of 1873 left every interest depressed. It was then that the effects of war and waste were fully felt, and then that the stoutest hearts were tried. Labor was restless and hard to control, the planter was out of funds and interest was high, real estate outside a few favored localities was depreciating, and the farmers were almost at the point of desperation.

605In all this hopelessness there were a few hopeful spirits, here and there one that could chirp. The hot days of politics were past and the newspapers must look to other fields. The Constitution was the first to look to the development of the State’s resources as the new opportunity for journalistic enterprise. This was a reconstruction in which the people could take part; the Constitution had fought the one, it would lead the other. From that time until now development has been the Constitution’s most important mission, and in that field its most earnest efforts have been put forth. Constructive journalism was a new thing, and the Constitution became the pioneer. Men might differ on matters of public policy, but no one could afford to differ with a newspaper devoted to building up its environment, its city, State, and section.

Here in Atlanta the effect of this new policy was first felt, and here are its richest results; but helpfulness is contagious, and everywhere the Constitution touched there was a better feeling, and on account of that feeling it touched farther and farther. Coupling with this constructive policy a news system of unprecedented thoroughness, the Constitution became inseparably connected with the life of the people. It was in touch with them everywhere in Georgia and the surrounding States, and finally its beneficent influence spread throughout the whole South, inspiring, encouraging, building up. While some old statesmen were conducting in its columns a discussion as to whether Georgia was growing richer or poorer, the policy of repair was unremittingly pursued; and before the death of Alexander Stephens, who had cried out that the State was going to decay, the signs of new life had already appeared and people began to talk about a New South.

The New South sprang from the scions of the old, and everywhere Confederate soldiers were leaders in this upbuilding. While they cherished the relics of by-gone valor and continued to keep the graves of their dead comrades green, they looked hopefully to the future and strove to lay the foundations of new greatness and future influence 606in the restored Union. This was the key-note of the most enlightened press, led by the Constitution, whose editor, Capt. Howell, was a Confederate soldier.

There came an interesting period of rivalry in this good work when Mr. Grady dashed into the arena. With the impulsive Alston he took charge of the Atlanta Herald in 1873, and for two years it was warm in Atlanta. Colonel J. W. Avery, who succeeded Barrick as editor of the Constitution, had gone over to the Herald, and Colonel E. Y. Clarke, who had bought out Mr. Anderson, was editor of the Constitution, while Mr. Hemphill remained business manager, a position he has filled without intermission since the birth of the paper. He and Colonel Clarke had already built the old Constitution building on Broad Street. Mr. Grady was making the Herald one of the brightest papers ever published in Atlanta, and there were several other dailies in the field. The old Intelligencer had passed away, and in its place had come the Sun, a Democratic paper edited by Alexander Stephens. The New Era, a scholarly Republican paper, was edited by Colonel William L. Scruggs, now Minister Plenipotentiary to Venezuela, and The True Georgian, another Republican paper, was edited by Sam Bard, a rugged product of those times. When the Herald came into this field there were five morning dailies in Atlanta. From the first the contest for supremacy was between the Constitution and the Herald. With Georgia Republicanism, the Republican papers passed out of existence, and the Sun soon followed, leaving only the Constitution and the Herald. In 1875 the fight between the two papers became desperate. There was no morning train on the Macon and Western road, and both papers wanted to reach middle Georgia. The result was that both ran special engines every morning from Atlanta to Macon, a distance of 104 miles. The expense of these engines absorbed the entire receipts of both papers, and left them to borrow money to pay ordinary expenses. The engines carried not over a thousand papers.

During the month that this fight for existence endured 607there were many exciting scenes. Both papers went to press about four o’clock, and it was a race to the depot every morning. The paper which got there first was given the main line first, and the day’s sales depended largely on the quickness of the cart-boys.

The contest was spirited but short. Both papers were heavily involved, and it was a question of endurance. The Constitution had almost reached the end of its row when a mortgage was foreclosed on the Herald. The Constitution survived with a heavy debt. In 1872 Mr. N. P. T. Finch had bought an interest in the paper, and after the failure of the Herald Mr. Clarke retired and Mr. Finch became editor. In 1876 Captain E. P. Howell, who had had some experience in journalism as city editor of the Intelligencer in its most vigorous days, and had since accumulated some property in the practice of law, bought with his brother Albert a half interest in the Constitution, and took the position of editor-in-chief, which he has held ever since. About the first thing Captain Howell did was to employ Mr. Grady, and the next day he secured Joel Chandler Harris. With this incomparable trio, associated with Mr. Finch, the paper began editorially a new life. The remnant of debts incurred in the fight with the Herald was soon wiped out, and from that day the Constitution has enjoyed unbroken prosperity.

Strongly equipped all around, the Constitution enlarged and intensified its operations. The campaign of 1876 was on, and Mr. Grady was sent to Florida, where he unearthed and exposed the ugly transaction by which the electoral vote of that State was given to Hayes. The whole nation hung upon the result with breathless interest, and newspapers were willing to pay any price for the news. The Constitution and the New York Herald were the first to unearth the fraud. On such occasions the Constitution always had the news, and soon came to be looked upon as the most enterprising paper in the South.

With the inauguration of Hayes the South turned away from politics in disgust, and then it was that the Constitution 608gave a new cue to the efforts of the people and turned their slumbering energy to the development of Georgia and the South.

Mr. Grady, whose Washington letters had made him a national reputation, turned his energies and his heart to development. He went about among the people looking into their concerns and making much of every incipient enterprise. In the agricultural regions he wrote letters that were pastoral poems in prose, strangely mixed with an intoxicating combination of facts and figures. When he wrote about Irish potatoes his city editor, Josiah Carter, now editor of the Atlanta Journal, planted several acres as a speculation; when he told of the profits in truck farming there was a furore in the rural districts; and when he got out on the stock farms and described the mild-eyed Jerseys, the stockmen went wild, and the herds were increased, while calves sold for fabulous prices.

Wherever he went his pen touched on industry, and as if by magic it grew and prospered. Fruits, melons, farms, minerals, everything that was in sight, he wrote about; and everything he wrote about became famous. It was in this way that the Constitution’s work was done. The people were wooed into enterprises of every sort, and most of them prospered.

Mr. Grady’s work had attracted the attention of prominent men everywhere, and in 1880 Cyrus W. Field, of New York, lent him $20,000 to buy a fourth interest in the Constitution. Mr. Field has stated since Mr. Grady’s death that he never had cause to regret the loan, as it was promptly repaid and had been the means of enlarging Mr. Grady’s work. Mr. Grady bought 250 shares, or $25,000 of the $100,000 of Constitution stock, from Messrs. Howell, Hemphill, and Finch, who had previously purchased the interest of Albert Howell. The stock was then equally owned by Captain E. P. Howell, Mr. W. A. Hemphill, Mr. N. P. T. Finch, and Mr. Grady. The staff was then reorganized, with Captain Howell as editor-in-chief, Mr. Grady, managing editor, and Mr. Finch and Joel Chandler 609Harris as associate editors. Mr. Wallace P. Reed was added in 1883, and Mr. Clark Howell, now managing editor, came on in 1884 as night editor. When he was promoted to be assistant managing editor in January, 1888, Mr. P. J. Moran, who had been with the Constitution since the suspension of the Sun in the early seventies, succeeded to the position of night editor. In 1886 Mr. Finch retired, and his interest was shared by Messrs. E. P. Howell, Hemphill, Grady, and Clark Howell, and two new proprietors, Messrs. S. M. Inman, of Atlanta, and James Swann. The Constitution has held on its staff at different times many of the most brilliant writers in the country, among them Sam Small, Henry Richardson, editor of the Macon Telegraph, Bill Arp, Betsey Hamilton, T. DeWitt Talmage, and a number of others. The editor of the Atlanta Evening Journal graduated from the city editorship of the Constitution in 1887, and was succeeded by Mr. J. K. Ohl, who still has charge of the city department. Mr. R. A. Hemphill had acquired some stock and was in the business department. The Constitution under the management of Mr. W. J. Campbell has built up a large publishing business and now does the printing for the State. The weekly circulation is in charge of Mr. Edward White, who has an army of agents in all parts of the Union. The western edition in the last month has grown to large proportions.

In 1883 the Constitution had outgrown its three-story building on Broad Street, and the company bought the present site on the corner of Alabama and Forsyth, and began the erection of the new Constitution building. It was completed in August, 1884, at a cost of $60,000 including the site, and the $30,000 perfecting press and other machinery ran the whole cost of the plant up to $125,000. The site is the best for its purpose in the city. In the heart of the town and on an eminence above most other points, the editorial rooms on the fourth and fifth floors overlook the city and the undulating country for miles around. On the north, historic Kennesaw rises, a grim monument of valor, and the white spires at its foot are visible to the naked eye. 610On the south, Stone Mountain raises its granite dome fifteen miles away, and to the northeast the eye reaches the first foothills of that bracing region of the moonshiners where the Blue Ridge breaks up and makes a Switzerland in Georgia.

In November, 1884, the Constitution christened its new building with the first news of Cleveland’s election. The Legislature then in session filled the Constitution building at night, eagerly and enthusiastically watching the returns. When at last one morning the result was definitely known, a joyous party went from the Constitution building to the Capitol, where occurred the memorable scene when Mr. Grady adjourned the Legislature.

A great crowd had collected about the Constitution office, and when at eleven o’clock A.M. it was known beyond a doubt that Cleveland was elected, a brass band was brought up, and Mr. Grady and Captain Howell headed the procession. The march through town was hilarious and exultant. The crowd carried a huge can of red paint which was lavishly applied to sidewalks and prominent objects on the line of march. When the procession passed up Marietta Street its enthusiasm led it into the Capitol where the Legislature was in session. Leading the head of the procession to the hall of the House of Representatives, Mr. Grady passed by the door-keeper into the main aisle. Colonel Lucius Lamar, of Pulaski, a man of imposing presence, was in the chair. His long hair fell over his shoulders, and his bearing was magnificent. Advancing down the aisle Mr. Grady paused and, in the stately formula of the door-keeper, cried, with the most imposing and dramatic manner:

“Mr. Speaker; A message from the American people.”

Catching the spirit of the invasion, the dignified Speaker said solemnly:

“Let it be received.”

With that Mr. Grady pressed up to the speaker’s chair, and quickly wresting the gavel from his hand, cried in imposing and exultant tones:

611“In the name of God and the American people, I declare this House adjourned to celebrate the election of Grover Cleveland, the first Democratic President in twenty-four years.”

At this there was a whirlwind of applause, and the House broke up with the wildest enthusiasm.

Mr. Grady often said that he and Oliver Cromwell were the only two men who ever adjourned a legislative body in that style.

From the occupation of the new building the Constitution took on tremendous growth. Mr. Grady had conceived an idea of making the greatest weekly in America, and since 1881 that edition had grown prodigiously. When it was enlarged to a twelve-page form in 1881, it had only 7200 subscribers. Special contributors were engaged, special correspondents were sent out, and a picket line of local agents was thrown out all over the South, while sample copies were doing missionary work in the northwest. The first year the circulation jumped to 20,000, the next to 35,000, and when the Constitution went into its new building in 1884 the 50,000 mark was reached. In 1887 the weekly passed 100,000, receiving 20,000 subscribers in December. In December, 1889, while Mr. Grady was in Boston, the paper broke the record with 20,000 subscribers in one day. During the month 27,000 subscriptions were received, and now the circulation is 146,000, of which 140,000 are subscribers and about 6000 sample copies.

The inspiring and reconstructive work of the Constitution culminated in the Cotton Exposition of 1881. The whole country was warmed by a wave of prosperity in 1880, and the people of the South, invigorated and enthused, entered heartily into the purposes of the Exposition. When they came to see that wonderful collection of resources it was a revelation and an inspiration to them. The ball was in motion, and through the decade it has rolled with steadily increasing momentum. The development of the South has already gone beyond the expectation of the most sanguine, and already this region has a 612firm hold on iron and cotton, the two greatest industries on the continent.

Over all this helpful and inspiring work Captain Howell, the editor-in-chief, had a watchful eye. His heart and his purse were enlisted, and he backed up the vigorous work of his paper with earnest personal work. He was concerned in the leading enterprises as organizer and subscriber to the stock. In the flush of enthusiasm he was a balance-wheel. He added the safe counsel of a mature business man to the enthusiasm of his more youthful partner, and then backed him up with money and prodigious energy.

The Kimball House burned down one Sunday in August, 1883, and immediately the Constitution set to work to raise the immense sum needed to replace the magnificent hotel. It had been the pride of Atlanta. Conventions and distinguished visitors from all sections of the country had been entertained there. It was Atlanta’s reception room, and was a necessity. It must be replaced, and the Constitution threw itself in the breach. Captain Howell became president of the new Kimball House Company, and bent himself to the enormous task of raising $650,000. The whole town was enthused, and Mr. Kimball’s magic services were again called into requisition. On the 12th of August, 1884, exactly one year from the day the old building was burned, the directors of the new Kimball House took tea on the fifth floor, and within six months the magnificent structure was completed. At the grand banquet which celebrated the event Captain Howell presided, and Mr. Grady was one of the principal speakers.

In all this development and upbuilding the other owners of the Constitution backed up its work with personal effort and financial support. Mr. Hemphill and Mr. Inman are stockholders in almost everything about Atlanta, and Mr. Swann, though now a resident of New York, continues to invest his money largely in Atlanta enterprises.

Perhaps the greatest service the Constitution ever did for Atlanta and the State was its work for the location of 613the Capitol here. The Constitutional Convention of 1877 left the question of location with the people and the election was held that fall. A vigorous campaign was precipitated almost from the adjournment of the Convention. Atlanta was in great straits. The Capitol had been removed there from Milledgeville by the Republicans, and the rank odor of reconstruction times and of negro and carpet-bag rule hung over the spot where their disgraceful transactions had been enacted. The glorious memories of the past were associated with Milledgeville, where the great men of the century had been in training. Macon, Augusta, Savannah, and the press of Southern Georgia sought to array these cherished associations against Atlanta, the dashing new city that had the audacity to set new patterns and do things in her own vigorous way. Something had to be done; enormous obstacles had to be overcome, and Atlanta resolved to do the work. The city council met and decided to spare no pains or expense to get the Capitol. A general campaign committee was organized with Captain J. W. English at its head, and the work from that center was begun. In addition to this a prudential committee of three was appointed and given a carte blanche to carry the election, with unlimited means at its command. On this committee were ex-Governor, now Senator, Joseph E. Brown, Major Campbell Wallace and Captain E. P. Howell, editor of the Constitution. The advanced age of the other two members made it necessary for Captain Howell to take the heaviest part of the work upon his shoulders and he worked night and day. Every county in the State, except those about Macon and Milledgeville, was covered with men talking for Atlanta, and the whole State was flooded with Atlanta literature. Some of the most distinguished speakers in the State were on the hustings, and the heaviest timber was on Atlanta’s side. It was a campaign of hard work. Every voter, white and colored, was reached by type and talk; and when the day came Atlanta won by 44,000 votes majority.

While the leading citizens of Atlanta, including the 614editors and owners of the Constitution, were personally at work in the campaign, the paper was the chief point of attack in a bitter newspaper war. Rancor ran almost to bloodshed. Atlanta editors in those days were prepared to talk it out or fight it out as their adversaries pleased. An editor’s courage was in demand as constantly as his pen, and there was no milk and water in editorials. The Constitution held the fort for Atlanta, and its flag flaunted serenely in the worst of the war.

Then came a long fight for an appropriation to build a new Capitol. The Constitution steadily advocated it, and its influence was thrown into the Legislature to back up Mr. Rice, the Atlanta member, who introduced the bill. Finally when a million dollars had been appropriated, the editor, Captain Howell, was put on the Capitol Commission to succeed the late Mr. Crane as the member from Atlanta.

Since then the Constitution has been a power in political campaigns, and its influence was triumphantly exerted in behalf of Governor Colquitt in the famous Colquitt-Norwood campaign, when part of the Democratic Convention split off and nominated Norwood after Colquitt had been named by the majority. Mr. Grady took charge of Governor Colquitt’s campaign, and to his efforts, more than to anything else, Colquitt’s election was due. In the Bacon-Boynton campaign the Constitution’s influence was exerted for Governor Boynton, and finally for Governor McDaniel, when Major Bacon had almost run away with the nomination. When Governor Gordon dashed into the State in 1886 Mr. Grady took charge of the campaign headquarters in Atlanta and directed the work for Gordon. The General’s wonderful magnetism was backed up with such prodigious work as the State had never known. The local influentials all over the State were largely pledged to Major Bacon, and it was thought he had the nomination in his pocket. Week by week, as the returns came in, the Gordon column crept up on Bacon’s, and in the closing weeks the General swept by him with a rush.

The prohibition campaign of 1887 was one of the most 615remarkable episodes in the history of Atlanta, and the division and tension among friends and neighbors was strikingly shown by the position of the gentlemen who owned the Constitution. Captain Howell, the editor in chief, was an ardent anti, and Mr. Grady, the managing editor, was the leading advocate of prohibition. Mr. Hemphill and Mr. Inman were for prohibition, and other stockholders were against it. The campaign committees on both sides loaded down the columns of the paper with bristling communications, while the editor-in-chief and the managing editor had thrown their whole strength into the campaign on opposite sides. Both were on the hustings, and it so happened that both spoke the same night, Captain Howell to an opera house full of antis, and Mr. Grady to a big warehouse full of prohibitionists. The whole town was on the qui vive; one-half the people were hurrahing for Howell and the other were cheering for Grady. The editors drew more than the houses would begin to hold, and their audiences were in a frenzy of delight.

The speeches were the talk of the day, and for days afterward their arguments were discussed and repeatedly mustered into service by the other speakers.

On the afternoon of the day they were to speak the Evening Journal contained the following spirited notice under the head of “Howell and Grady”:

The reproduction of this ancient rhyme is not intended as an insinuation that Mr. Henry W. Grady, the silver-tongued prohibition orator of to-night, has any of the attributes of Jack Spratt, or that Colonel Evan P. Howell, the redoubtable champion of the antis, has any of the peculiarities of Jack Spratt’s conjugal associate. The idea sought to be conveyed is that the fat and lean of prohibition will be energetically attacked by these gentlemen to-night at the same hour from opposite sides of the table.

It goes without saying that between them both the platter will be 616licked clean, and it is to be hoped that this hearty prohibition meal will be thoroughly digested and assimilated to Atlanta’s system, that growth in her every tissue will be the result.

It would be hard to select two more effective speakers and two more entirely different.

“What is Colonel Howell’s style of oratory?” said one newspaper man to another.

“Well,” said he, “you have heard Grady? you know how he speaks?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Grady makes you feel like you want to be an angel and with the angels stand, and Howell makes you feel as if he were the commander of an army, waving his sword and saying, ‘Follow me,’ and you would follow him to the death.”

Both of these speakers will raise enthusiasm at the start. As Grady ascends the platform the band will play “Dixie” and the audience will be almost in a frenzy of delight. As Colonel Howard comes forward the band will be likely to play the “Marsellaise Hymn,”—some air that stirs the sterner nature—and he will be received with thunders of applause.

With infinite jest and with subtle humor Mr. Grady will lead his audience by the still waters where pleasant pastures lie; and there he will “take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea.”

Howell will march his audience, like an army, through flood and fire and fell; he will cross the sea, like a Norseman, to conquer Britain. In Grady’s flights you only hear the cherubim’s wing; in Howell’s march the drum-beat never ceases. Grady’s eloquence is like a cumulus cloud that rises invisible as mist till it unfolds its white banners in the sky; Howell’s is like a rushing mountain stream that tears every rock and crag from its path, gathering volume as it goes.

Mr. Howell will doubtless deal in statistics; Mr. Grady will have figures, but they will not smell of the census. They will take on the pleasing shape that induced one of his reporters to plant a crop of Irish potatoes on a speculation. To-night Atlanta will be treated to a hopeful view of prohibition by the most eloquent optimist in the country. The contrast will be drawn with all the ruggedness of a strong, blunt man.

The day after the election, when 1100 majority had been announced against prohibition, Captain Howell and Mr. Grady printed characteristic cards. Captain Howell, from the standpoint of victory, gave in a few words his reasons for his course, and closed by saying:

617A word about my partners. I have differed from them on this question, and I know that they have been prompted by the same consciousness of duty which caused me to so differ. I love Henry Grady as a brother, and no one appreciates more highly than I his noble and unselfish devotion to our city; no one knows better than I his earnestness and faithful attachment to her welfare. Mr. Hemphill and Mr. Inman are as true and tried citizens as Atlanta has, and are among my warmest personal friends. Nothing that has occurred during this campaign could mar the relations existing between us. The only regret I have about the campaign is that I found it necessary to differ with them, but I am confident that they will now join hands with me in carrying out the purposes (uniting the people) as expressed above.

Mr. Grady declared his unshaken affection for his partner, and pledged his aid to him in his purposes to unite Atlanta and keep the sale of liquor within bounds. As for his own part in the campaign, he expresses himself in these remarkable words:

When everything else I have said or done is forgotten, I want the words I have spoken for prohibition in Atlanta to be remembered. I am prouder of my share in the campaign that has ended in its defeat than of my share in all other campaigns that have ended in victory. I espoused its cause deliberately, and I have worked for its success night and day, to the very best of my ability. My only regret is that my ability was not greater.

This reunion of the owners of the Constitution was the prompt example which set a pattern for the community. Within a year from the close of the bitterest campaign in Atlanta’s history, one in which many a house and many a family was divided against itself, the acrimony had almost entirely disappeared. The wounds of the campaign were healed and the soreness of defeat had disappeared; Atlanta was re-united, and on every side were signs of prosperity and good-will. In another twelvemonth she had to enlarge her girth a quarter of a mile all round; nine hundred houses were built, every one was filled, and there was a pressing demand for more. The Constitution turned from this struggle with its owners more strongly cemented by personal friendship than ever before, and in the closing 618weeks of 1889 the paper touched a higher mark of prosperity than it had ever known.

After Mr. Grady’s death the Constitution pursued the even tenor of its way. Saddened by that great calamity the late editor’s associates realized that there was great work for them to do. The succession to the management was as natural as the passing of one day into another. Mr. Clark Howell, Jr., eldest son of the editor-in-chief, had been on the paper six years, first as night editor and then as assistant managing editor. In Mr. Grady’s absence he had been in charge, and in taking the position of managing editor at twenty-six years of age, he assumed duties and responsibilities that were not new to him. He was fortified by an extensive personal acquaintance formed not only in his newspaper experience, but in two terms of active service as a representative of Fulton County in the Legislature, having been nominated for the first term before he was twenty-one years of age.

Mr. Howell won his spurs as a newspaper man before he was twenty. On graduating from the University of Georgia in 1883 he went to the New York Times as an apprentice in its local department. It was Captain Howell’s policy to throw his son on his own resources, and the moderate allowance during college days, was almost entirely withdrawn when young Clark went to New York. A young reporter working on twelve dollars a week was sorely put to it to make ends meet in a great city like New York. From the New York Times city department Mr. Howell went to the Philadelphia Press, assisting in the news editing department. It was while he was in Philadelphia, with very little cash, that he seized an opportunity to make some money and a good deal of reputation. Samuel J. Tilden was being urged to allow the use of his name for the second Presidential nomination. He had not said yea or nay, and the country was anxiously awaiting his decision, for his consent would have settled the question of Democratic leadership. Mr. Howell went to New York for the Constitution, and his interview with Mr. Tilden 619was the first announcement of the old statesman’s determination not to enter the contest again. That night Mr. Howell telegraphed the news to two hundred papers, and the interview with the sage of Gramercy Park was read on two continents. The young journalist who had scored a scoop on all the ambitious newspaper men of the country received flattering notices from the press, besides the comforting addition of $400 to his almost invisible cash.

Mr. Howell then came on the Constitution as night editor, and was afterward promoted to the position of assistant managing editor. What native ability and six years of training did for him was made manifest very soon after he assumed his new responsibility.

For days the letters and telegrams of condolence and tributes to Mr. Grady filled the paper, and to that and the monument movement all other matter was, for the time, made subordinate. When at last the burden of the people’s grief had found full expression, the Constitution turned itself with renewed vigor to its work. Captain Howell was on deck, the new managing editor plunged into every detail, and soon a general improvement was the result; the Constitution took on new life. Then Mr. Howell turned on all his energies and put the magnificent machinery at his disposal up to its full speed. The daily issues drew daily commendations of their excellence from the press, and the first twenty-four-page Sunday’s edition was pronounced by many the best the Constitution had ever issued.

The people realized that the Constitution, though it had suffered a great loss in Mr. Grady’s death, was still in strong hands, and from all parts of its territory came renewed expressions of confidence and sympathy. So the Constitution continues its work, enlarging and improving as it goes, ever looking to the future while it cherishes a magnificent past which it could not and would not let die.

New York, Dec. 23.—The New England Society celebrated to-night its 84th anniversary and the 469th of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers with a dinner.

Mr. Depew spoke to the toast of “Unsolved Problems,” and in the course of his remarks he referred to the death of Henry W. Grady. He said:

“Thirty years ago, Robert Toombs, of Georgia, one of the ablest and most brilliant defenders of slavery, said in his place in the United States Senate that he would yet call the roll of his bondmen at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. To-day his slaves are citizens and voters. Within a few days a younger Georgian, possessed of equal genius, but imbued with sentiments so leavened that the great Senator would have held him an enemy to the State, was the guest of Boston. With a power of presentation and a fervor of declaration worthy of the best days and noblest efforts of eloquence, he stood beneath the shadow of Bunker Hill and uttered opinions justifying the suppression of the negro vote, which were hostile to the views of every man in his audience, and yet they gave to his argument an eager and candid hearing, and to his oratory unstinted and generous applause. It was triumphant of Puritan principles and Puritan pluck. They know we know that no system of suffrage can survive the intimidation of the voter or the falsification of the courts. Public conscience, by the approval of fraud upon the ballot and the intelligence of a community, will soon be indifferent to the extensions of those methods by the present office-holders to continue in 624power, and the arbitrary reversing of the will of the majority will end in anarchy and despotism.

“This is a burning question, not only in Georgia, but in New York. It is that the government for the people shall be by the people. No matter how grave the questions which absorb the people’s attention or engross their time, the permanence of their solution rests upon a pure ballot.

“The telegraph brings us this evening the announcement of the death of Henry W. Grady, and we forget all differences of opinion and remember only his chivalry, patriotism, and his genius. He was the leader of the New South, and died in the great work of impressing its marvelous growth and national inspirations upon the willing ears of the North. Upon this platform, and before this audience, two years ago, he commanded the attention of the country and won universal fame. His death, in the meridian of his powers and the hopefulness of his mission, at a critical period of the removal forever of all misunderstanding and differences between all sections of the Republic, is a national calamity. New York mingles her tears with those of his kindred, and offers to his memory a tribute of her profoundest admiration.”

EX-PRESIDENT CLEVELAND.

Mrs. Henry W. Grady: Accept the heartfelt sympathy of one who loved your husband for what he was and for all that he had done for his people and his country. Be assured that everywhere throughout the land warm hearts mourn with you in your deep affliction and deplore the loss the nation has sustained.

Nashville, Tenn., December 26, 1889.

Mr. A. W. Davis, Atlanta, Ga.:

My Dear Sir:—I feel as if, in coming to what I had hoped to be a joyous occasion, I am coming to the house of mourning—the home of sorrow. Since the tragic end of the young Irish patriot, death has not more ruthlessly invaded the land of “shining marks” than when he the other day came to your beautiful city—a city of happiness and “high ways”—and, as if looking with remorseless purpose into the very secrets of domestic felicity and popular affection—took up and carried away into the land of the unseeable the idol of a happy home and of a great city. Not only was Henry W. Grady the idol of his own city and State, but without office and without estate, though young in years, he had attained a maturity of both pen and heart which brought renown as an American patriot far beyond what place or power can give. His death is a national calamity. In times of peace, when much of the press and many of the public men are inviting patronage and seeking favors in fanning the passions born of a sectional issue, to see a truly national and brave man, who, loving his own native section, can nevertheless glory in a common country and a common destiny for all the American people—is to the patriot philosopher, who divines the happiness of a reunited people, the bright star of hope rising to dissipate the prejudices of the past and light up the pathway to the coming millions.

Unfortunately, oh, how much to be deplored! the passions of the sections have been kept alive by the pen and tongue of the politician seeking patronage and office.

The young man of your city whose death all patriots mourn, put himself on a higher plane—freed from passion and rising above his own ambition, he gave tone and temper to a national sentiment, which might be uttered in 626Boston or Atlanta with equal propriety and patriotism and from the emotions of his patriotic heart, he spoke words which, while they were full of the manhood of his own loved South, nevertheless warmed into a generous sympathy the North man as well as the South man, and put American citizenship so high that the young men of the country may, without the sacrifice of local pride, ever aspire to reach it.

As an example of Southern manhood, patriotic fervor, and a statesmanship extending over the entire country and into the coming generations, all sparkling with the scintillation of an intelligent courage that defied alike the prejudices of the ignorant and the appeals of the demagogue, he was the representative and leader of a sentiment in the South which promised speedily a reforming of public sentiment north and south, a turning from the shades of the past into the lighted avenues of the future—these avenues opening to all alike without the sacrifice of manhood or the domination of section.

I repeat, his death is a calamity, and oh, how sad and mysterious!

Truly, A. S. Colyar.

HON. MURAT HALSTEAD.

Mrs. H. W. Grady:

I desire to inscribe my name among those who feel the public misfortune of Mr. Grady’s death as a personal loss, and hope you may know how true it is that there are no boundaries to sincere regrets and earnest sympathies.

House of Representatives,

Washington, D. C., December 24, 1889.

Hon. E. P. Howell, Atlanta, Ga.:

My Dear Sir:—I telegraphed briefly yesterday afternoon, immediately upon hearing of the death of our dear friend. I do not know when I have been more shocked than I have been at this great calamity, and I cannot yet bring my mind to realize it. The ways of Providence are strange indeed, but we should submit with Christian fortitude.

So young a man, with so bright a future, and capable of so much benefit to his State and country, it is hard indeed to part with. His great object in life was to break down sectionalism and bring the South to her full capabilities of development. But I have not the heart to write more.

Give Mrs. Randall’s love to Mrs. Grady and my kindest sympathy, and tell her that as long as life lasts with us Mr. Grady’s hundred and more kindnesses to both will never fade from our memory.

MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE.

Captain Howell:

Only those who stood at Mr. Grady’s side as we did and heard him at Boston can estimate the extent of the nation’s loss in his death. It seemed reserved for him to perform a service to his country which no other could perform so well. Mrs. Carnegie and I share your grief and tender to his family profound sympathy. We send a wreath in your care which please place upon the grave of the eloquent peacemaker between the North and South.

The Honorable, the Mayor:

Springfield shares the sorrow of her sister city. The death of such a man as Henry Woodfin Grady is a national loss.

To Mrs. Henry Grady:

The New York Southern Society, profoundly affected by a sense of the public loss sustained in the death of your distinguished husband, offer you their heartfelt sympathy in the great affliction you have suffered.

Governor Rufus B. Bullock:

Your dispatch is received with sincere sorrow. Thousands of our citizens recognized in Mr. Grady a man worthy of the highest respect and esteem, and will regard his untimely death a national calamity.

Alonzo B. Cornell.

Evan Howell:

Please give my earnest sympathy to Mrs. Grady. The profession has lost one of its three or four foremost members, and the country a true patriot.