Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
History
Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
Grady, Henry Woodfin, 1850-1889
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.
The 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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