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Famous Givers and Their Gifts. Bolton Sarah Knowles
Читать онлайн.Название Famous Givers and Their Gifts
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Автор произведения Bolton Sarah Knowles
Жанр Зарубежная классика
Издательство Public Domain
To add still more to Mr. Girard's sorrow, after his wife had been at the hospital several months, on March 3, 1791, a daughter was born to her, who was named for the mother, Mary Girard. The infant was taken into the country to be cared for, and lived but a few months. It was buried in the graveyard of the parish church.
Bereft of his only child, his home desolate, Mr. Girard plunged more than ever into the whirl of business. He built six large ships, naming some of them after his favorite authors, – Voltaire, Helvetius, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Good Friends, and North America, – to trade with China and India, and other Eastern countries. He would send grain and cotton to Bordeaux, where, after unloading, his ships would reload with fruit and wine for St. Petersburg. There they would dispose of their cargo, and take on hemp and iron for Amsterdam. From there they would go to Calcutta and Canton, and return, laden with tea and silks, to Philadelphia.
Little was known about the quiet, taciturn Frenchman; but every one supposed he was becoming very rich, which was the truth. He was not always successful. He says in one of his letters, "We are all the subjects of what you call 'reverses of fortune.' The great secret is to make good use of fortune, and when reverses come, receive them with sang froid, and by redoubled activity and economy endeavor to repair them." His ship Montesquieu, from Canton, China, arrived within the capes of Delaware, March 26, 1813, not having heard of the war between America and England, and was captured with her valuable cargo, the fruits of the two years' voyage. The ship was valued at $20,000, and the cargo over $164,000. He immediately tried to ransom her, and did so with $180,000 in coin. When her cargo was sold, the sales amounted to nearly $500,000, so that Girard's quickness and good sense, in spite of the ransom, brought him large gains. The teas were sold for over two dollars a pound, on account of their scarcity from the war.
Mr. Girard rose early and worked late. He spent little on clothes or for daily needs. He evidently did not care simply to make money; for he wrote his friend Duplessis at New Orleans: "I do not value fortune. The love of labor is my highest ambition… I observe with pleasure that you have a numerous family, that you are happy in the possession of an honest fortune. This is all that a wise man has a right to wish for. As to myself, I live like a galley-slave, constantly occupied, and often passing the night without sleeping. I am wrapped up in a labyrinth of affairs, and worn out with care."
To another he wrote: "When I rise in the morning my only effort is to labor so hard during the day that when the night comes I may be enabled to sleep soundly." He had the same strong will as in his boyhood, but he usually controlled his temper. He kept his business to himself, and would not permit his clerks to gossip about his affairs. They had to be men of correct habits while in his employ. Having some suspicion of one of the officers of his ship Voltaire, he wrote to Captain Bowen: "I desire you not to permit a drunken or immoral man to remain on board of your ship. Whenever such a man makes disturbance, or is disagreeable to the rest of the crew, discharge him whenever you have the opportunity. And if any of my apprentices should not conduct themselves properly, I authorize you to correct them as I would myself. My intention being that they shall learn their business, so after they are free they may be useful to themselves and their country."
Mr. Girard gave minute instructions to all his employees, with the direction that they were to "break owners, not orders." Miss Louise Stockton, in "A Sylvan City, or Quaint Corners in Philadelphia," tells the following incident, illustrative of Mr. Girard's inflexible rule: "He once sent a young supercargo with two ships on a two years' voyage. He was to go first to London, then to Amsterdam, and so from port to port, selling and buying, until at last he was to go to Mocha, buy coffee, and turn back. At London, however, the young fellow was charged by the Barings not to go to Mocha, or he would fall into the hands of pirates; at Amsterdam they told him the same thing. Everywhere the caution was repeated; but he sailed on until he came to the last port before Mocha. Here he was consigned to a merchant who had been an apprentice to Girard in Philadelphia; and he, too, told him he must not dare venture near the Red Sea.
"The supercargo was now in a dilemma. On one side was his master's order; on the other, two vessels, a valuable cargo, and a large sum of money. The merchant knew Girard's peculiarities as well as the supercargo did; but he thought the rule to "break owners, not orders" might this time be governed by discretion. 'You'll not only lose all you have made,' he said, 'but you'll never go home to justify yourself.'
"The young man reflected. After all, the object of his voyages was to get coffee; and there was no danger in going to Java, so he turned his prow, and away he sailed to the Chinese seas. He bought coffee at four dollars a sack, and sold it in Amsterdam at a most enormous advance, and then went back to Philadelphia in good order, with large profits, sure of approval. Soon after he entered the counting-room Girard came in. He looked at the young fellow from under his bushy brows, and his one eye gleamed with resentment. He did not greet him, nor welcome him, nor congratulate him, but, shaking his angry hand, cried, 'What for you not go to Mocha, sir?' And for the moment the supercargo wished he had. But this was all Girard ever said on the subject. He rarely scolded his employees. He might express his opinion by cutting down a salary, and when a man did not suit him he dismissed him."
When one of Girard's bookkeepers, Stephen Simpson, apparently with little or no provocation, assaulted a fellow bookkeeper, injuring him so severely about the head that the man was unable to leave his home for more than a week, Girard simply laid a letter on Simpson's desk the next morning, reducing his salary from fifteen hundred dollars to one thousand per annum. The clerk was very angry, but did not give up his situation. When an errand-boy was caught in the act of stealing small sums of money from the counting-house, Mr. Girard put a more intricate lock on the money-drawer, and made no comment. The boy was sorry for his conduct, and gave no further occasion for complaint.
Girard believed in labor as a necessity for every human being. He used to say, "No man shall be a gentleman on my money." If he had a son he should labor. He said, "If I should leave him twenty thousand dollars, he would be lazy or turn gambler." Mr. Ingram tells an amusing incident of an Irishman who applied to Mr. Girard for work. "Engaging the man for a whole day, he directed the removal from one side of his yard to the other of a pile of bricks, which had been stored there awaiting some building operations; and this task, which consumed several hours, being completed, he was accosted by the Irishman to know what should be done next. 'Why, have you finished that already?' said Girard; 'I thought it would take all day to do that. Well, just move them all back again where you took them from; that will use up the rest of the day;' and upon the astonished Irishman's flat refusal to perform such fruitless labor, he was promptly paid and discharged, Girard saying at the same time, in a rather aggrieved manner, 'I certainly understood you to say that you wanted any kind of work.'"
Absorbed as Mr. Girard was in his business, cold and unapproachable as he seemed to the people of Philadelphia, he had noble qualities, which showed themselves in the hour of need. In the latter part of July, 1793, yellow fever in its most fatal form broke out in Water Street, within a square of Mr. Girard's residence. The city was soon in a panic. Most of the public offices were closed, the churches were shut up, and people fled from the city whenever it was possible to do so. Corpses were taken to the grave on the shafts of a chaise driven by a negro, unattended, and without ceremony.
"Many never walked in the footpath, but went in the middle of the streets, to avoid being infected in passing houses wherein people had died. Acquaintances and friends avoided each other in the streets, and only signified their regard by a cold nod. The old custom of shaking hands fell into such disuse that many shrank back with affright at even the offer of a hand. The death-calls echoed through the silent, grass-grown streets; and at night the watcher would hear at his neighbor's door the cry, 'Bring out your dead!' and the dead were brought. Unwept over, unprayed for, they were wrapped in the sheet in which they died, and were hurried into a box, and thrown into a great pit, the rich and the poor together."
"Authentic cases are recorded," says Henry W. Arey in his "Girard College and its Founder," "where parent and child and husband and wife died deserted and alone, for want of a little care from the hands of absent kindred."
In the midst of this dreadful plague an anonymous call for volunteer aid appeared