he
State banks who sought to supplant the United States Bank. The struggle
was really one between two sets of capitalistic interests.

Shipping and banking were the chief sources of Girard's wealth, with
side investments in real estate and other forms of property. He owned
large tracts of land in Philadelphia, the value of which increased
rapidly with the growth of population; he was a heavy stockholder in
river navigation companies and near the end of his life he subscribed
$200,000 toward the construction of the Danville & Pottsville Railroad.

THE SOLITARY CROESUS.

He was at this time a solitary, crusty old man living in a four-story
house on Water street, pursued by the contumely of every one, even of
those who flattered him for mercenary purposes. Children he had none,
and his wife was long since dead. His great wealth brought him no
comfort; the environment with which he surrounded himself was mean and
sordid; many of his clerks lived in better style. There, in his dingy
habitation, this lone, weazened veteran of commerce immersed himself in
the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Paine and Rousseau, of whom he was a
profound admirer and after whom some of his best ships were named.

This grim miser had, after all, the one great redeeming quality of being
true to himself. He made no pretense to religion and had an abhorrence
of hypocrisy. Cant was not in his nature. Out into the world he went, a
ferocious shark, cold-eyed for prey, but he never cloaked his motives
beneath a calculating exterior of piety or benevolence. Thousands upon
thousands he had deceived, for business was business, but himself he
never deceived. His bitter scoffs at what he termed theologic
absurdities and superstitions and his terrific rebuffs to ministers who
appealed to him for money, undoubtedly called forth a considerable
share of the odium which was hurled upon him. He defied the anathemas of
organized churchdom; he took hold of the commercial world and shook it
harshly and emerged laden with spoils. To the last, his volcanic spirit
flashed forth, even when, eighty years old, he lay with an ear cut off,
his face bruised and his sight entirely destroyed, the result of being
felled by a wagon.

In all his eighty-one years charity had no place in his heart. But
after, on Dec. 26, 1831, he lay stone dead and his will was opened, what
a surprise there was! His relatives all received bequests; his very
apprentices each got five hundred dollar