Rittenhouse square may seem warm and friendly and democratic with its neat pattern of paths and grass-plots, its rather genteel loungers upon its shadiest benches, the children of the nurse-maids playing beneath the trees. But the great houses that look down into it are neither warm nor friendly nor democratic. They are merely gazing at you--and inquiring--inquiring if you please, if you have Pennsylvania blood and breeding. If you have not, closed houses they are to remain to you. But if you do possess these things they will open--with as warm and friendly a hospitality as you may find in the land. There is the first trace of the Southland in the hospitality of Philadelphia, just as her red brick houses, her brick pavement and her old-fashioned use of the market, smack of the cities that rest to the south rather than those to the north.
To give more than a glimpse of the concrete Philadelphia within these limits is quite out of the question. It would mean incidentally the telling of her great charities, her wonderful museum of art whose winter show is an annual pilgrimage for the painters from all the eastern portion of the land, of her vast educational projects. Two of these last deserve a passing mention, however. One might never write of Philadelphia and forget her university--that great institution upon the west bank of the Schuylkill which awoke almost overnight to find itself man-size, a man-sized opportunity awaiting. And one should not speak of the University of Pennsylvania and forget the college that Stephen Girard founded. Of course Girard College is not a college at all but a great charity school for boys, but it is none the less interesting because of that.
The story of Stephen Girard is the story of the man who was not alone the richest man in Philadelphia but the richest man in America as well. But among all his assets he did not have happiness. His beautiful young wife was sent to a madhouse early in her life, and Girard shut himself off from the companionship of men, save the necessity of business dealings with them. He was known as a stern, irascible, hard screw of a man--immensely just but seemingly hardly human. Only once did Philadelphia ever see him as anything else--and that was in the yellow fever panic at the end of the eighteenth century when Stephen Girard, its great merchant and banker, went out and with his own purse and his own hands took his part in alleviating the disaster. It was many years afterward that Girard College came into being; its center structure a Greek temple, probably the most beautiful of its sort in the land, and its stern provision against the admission of clergymen even to the grounds of the institution, a reflection of its founder's hard mind coming down through the years. Today it is a great charity school, taking boys at eight years of age and keeping them, if need be, until they are eighteen, and in all those years not only schooling but housing them and feeding them as well as the finest private-school in all this land.