Oh! ye cities and nations, cherish, I pray you, the names of your heroes in business, art, finance and poetry, for only by them and through them shall the future know you. Have a care, ye cities! for the treatment that ye accord to these, living, and to their memories, dead, is but the telltale record of your own heart and brain!
Benjamin Franklin founded the Philadelphia Public Library, the Philadelphia Hospital, the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum and the University of Pennsylvania.
Franklin was also much interested in good roads, the building of canals—steam-railroads were then, of course, a dream unguessed.
Girard got his philanthropic impetus from Franklin. Girard had watched the progress of the University of Pennsylvania, and he had become convinced that it fell short of doing the good it might do. It shot too high.
Franklin had a beautiful contempt for Harvard. He called it a social promotion plan, and thereby got the lasting enmity of John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, and also of John Hancock.
Franklin had hoped to make the University of Pennsylvania a different school. But after his death it followed in exactly the Harvard lines. It fitted prosperous youth for the professions, but it left the orphan and the outcast to struggle with the demons of darkness, discarded and forgotten. Girard founded his college with the idea of helping the helpless. Thomas Jefferson, also, had impressed Girard greatly. Girard once made a trip to Monticello; and he spent two days at the University of Virginia. This was really remarkable, for time with Girard was a very precious commodity.
Thomas Jefferson was the man who introduced classic architecture into America. All of those great white pillars that front the mansions of Virginia, and in fact of the whole South, had their germ in the brain of Jefferson, who reveled in all that was Greek. Jefferson was a composite of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and if Socrates was not the first Jeffersonian Democrat, then who was?
Socrates dwelt on the rights and virtues of the "demos"—the Common People. Jefferson uses the expression again and again, and was the one man to popularize the word "Democrat." When Jefferson, wearing his suit of butternut homespun, rode horseback up to the Washington Capitol and tied his horse and walked over to the office of the Chief Justice and took the oath of office as President of the United States his action was essentially Socratic.
Girard got his ideals both of architecture and of education from Jefferson.