"What would
Franklin have done under these conditions?" And he answered the question
by going to the pesthouse, doing for the stricken, the dying and the
dead what the pitying Christ would have done had He been on earth.

Girard believed in humanity; he believed in men as did Franklin,
Jefferson and Paine, and as did that other great citizen of Philadelphia
who, too, was willing to give his life in the hospitals that men might
live--Walt Whitman.

No one ever called Walt Whitman a financier. Some have said that Stephen
Girard was nothing else. In any event, Girard and Whitman, between them,
hold averages true. And they both believed in and loved humanity. And
here is a fact: when we make up the composite man--the perfect
man--taking our human material from American history, we can not omit
from our formula Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine,
Stephen Girard and Walt Whitman.

* * * * *

Stephen Girard was born at Bordeaux, France, in Seventeen Hundred Fifty.
He died at Philadelphia in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-one.

Immediately after his death there was printed a book which purported to
be his biography. It was the work of a bank-clerk who had been
discharged by Girard. This man had been close enough to his employer to
lend plausibility to much that he had to say, and as the author called
himself Girard's private secretary, people with prejudices plus pointed
to the printed page as authority. The volume served to fill the popular
demand for pishmince. It was written with exactly the same intent that
Cheetham, who wrote his "Life of Thomas Paine," brought to bear. The
desire was to damn the subject for all time. Besides that, it was a
great business stroke--calumny was made to pay dividends. To libel the
dead is not, in the eyes of the law, a crime.

No such book as this "Life of Girard" could ever have been circulated
about a living man. "Once upon a time an ass kicked a lion, but the lion
was dead."

Yet this libelous production was reprinted as late as Eighteen Hundred
Ninety. Cheetham's book was quoted as an authority on Thomas Paine until
the year Nineteen Hundred, when Moncure D. Conway's exhaustive "Life"
made the pious prevaricators absurd.

From being a bitter "infidel," a hater of humanity, grossly ignorant and
wholly indifferent to the decencies, we now view Girard as a lonely and
pathetic figure, living out his long life in untiring industry, always
honest