en, found
themselves facing new conditions and new possibilities. Slavery had been
abolished utterly and forever; and wise men breathed freer when they
saw that a great obstacle to progress and development had been
abolished with it. Instinctively everybody felt that here was cause for
congratulation. A few public men, bolder than the rest, looking out on
the prospect, thanked God that slavery was no more. They expected to be
attacked for such utterances, but they were applauded; and it was soon
discovered, much to the surprise of everybody, that the best sentiment
of the South was heartily glad that slavery was out of the way. Thus,
with new conditions, new prospects, and new hopes,--with a new fortune,
in fact,--it was natural that some lively prophet should lift up his
voice and cry, "Behold the New South!"

And it was and is the new South,--the old South made new by events;
the old South with new channels, in which its Anglo-Saxon energies may
display themselves; the old South with new possibilities of greatness,
that would never have offered themselves while slavery lasted. After
these hopes, and in pursuit of these prospects, Georgia has led the way.
Hundreds of miles of new railroads have been built in her borders since
the dark days of reconstruction, hundreds of new factories have been
built, immense marble beds and granite quarries have been put in
operation, new towns have sprung into existence, and in thousands of new
directions employment has been given to labor and capital. In short, the
industrial progress the State has made since 1870 is more than double
that of the previous fifty years.

It was natural, that, out of the new conditions, new men should arise;
and, as if in response to the needs of the hour and the demands of the
people, there arose a man who, with no selfish ends to serve and no
selfish ambition to satisfy, was able to touch the hearts of the people
of both sections, and to subdue the spirit of sectionalism that was
still rampant long after the carpetbag governments in the South had been
overthrown by the force of public opinion. That man was Henry Woodfin
Grady. He took up his public work in earnest in 1876, though he had been
preparing for it since the day that he could read a school history. In
that year he became one of the editors of the "Atlanta Constitution,"
and at once turned his attention to the situation in which his State
had been left by the war, and by the rapacity of those