“I do hereby certify that Stephen Girard, of the city of Philadelphia, merchant, hath voluntarily taken the oath of allegiance and fidelity, as directed by an act of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, passed the 13th day of June, A.D. 1777.  Witness my hand and seal, the 27th day of October, A.D. 1778.

                                   “JNO.  ORD. 
                                   No. 1678.”

The oath was repeated the year following.  When the French Revolution had divided the country into two parties, the Federalists and the Republicans, Girard was a Republican of the radical school.  He remembered assisting to raise a liberty-pole in the Presidency of John Adams; and he was one of Mr. Jefferson’s most uncompromising adherents at a time when men of substance were seldom found in the ranks of the Democrats.  As long as he lived, he held the name of Thomas Jefferson in veneration.

We have now to contemplate this cold, close, ungainly, ungracious man in a new character.  We are to see that a man may seem indifferent to the woes of individuals, but perform sublime acts of devotion to a community.  We are to observe that there are men of sterling but peculiar metal, who only shine when the furnace of general affliction is hottest.  In 1793, the malignant yellow-fever desolated Philadelphia.  The consternation of the people cannot be conceived by readers of the present day, because we cannot conceive of the ignorance which then prevailed respecting the laws of contagion, because we have lost in some degree the habit of panic, and because no kind of horror can be as novel to us as the yellow-fever was to the people of Philadelphia in 1793.  One half of the population fled.  Those who remained left their houses only when compelled.  Most of the churches, the great Coffee-House, the Library, were closed.  Of four daily newspapers, only one continued to be published.  Some people constantly smoked tobacco,—­even women and children, did so; others chewed garlic; others exploded gunpowder; others burned nitre or sprinkled vinegar; many assiduously whitewashed every surface within their reach; some carried tarred rope in their hands, or bags of camphor round their necks; others never ventured abroad without a handkerchief or a sponge wet with vinegar at their noses.  No one ventured to shake hands.  Friends who met in the streets gave each other a wide berth, eyed one another askance, exchanged nods, and strode on.  It was a custom to walk in the middle of the street, to get as far from the houses as possible.  Many of the sick died without help, and the dead were buried without ceremony.  The horrid silence of the streets was broken only by the tread of litter-bearers and the awful rumble of the dead-wagon.  Whole families perished,—­perished without assistance, their fate unknown to their neighbors.  Money was powerless to buy attendance for the operation of all ordinary motives was suspended.  From the 1st of August to the 9th of November, in a population of twenty-five thousand, there were four thousand and thirty-one burials,—­about one in six.