That was the case with Esther. She was a Jewess. She owed her birth and her breeding to that despised, exiled people. She had won her proud position on the emperor's throne through the planning, and toiling, and sacrifice of her Jewish guardian. And now her people's destiny hangs on the balance. A deadly conspiracy against them has brought it about that on a given day, rapidly approaching, there is to be a universal merciless massacre of these defenceless Jews. And through the mouth of her old revered guardian the demand comes to her—the one human being that might have influence with the cruel king to cancel the decree and save the lives of men, women, and children—at the risk and peril of her own life in asking it, to go and intercede for them. Hard! oh, how hard! Don't you judge harshly the poor queen when she shrank away from it and could not face the stern summons. Think of it, the young flesh, the soft heart—a woman's heart—within her, and think of the cruel death by torture that was wont to be inflicted upon any one that, unbidden, dared to force his way into the king's presence; coming, too, in the bright noonday of all her good fortune. It would have been easier to risk life when she was an unknown Jewish maiden; but oh, in this good luck, this fortune, this love, this adulation, this admiration, with her right fair beauty all upon her, to take it all and go and confront grim death! it seemed too much to ask. And so Esther began arguing within herself: Was she bound to hazard her life for these Jews? After all, what had they done for her? They were her race, her kindred, but what of that? Had she not come out from among them? Has not destiny taken her lot and separated it from theirs? Why cannot she live her own life apart from them? Why should she come down from the throne and take her stand among them, exposed to cruel massacre and death? What is the obligation? Where are the ties that bound her lot to theirs? Ay, where were the ties of love and the obligations to generosity? They are too fine and impalpable to be proved by argument. The moment you begin discussing them or questioning them—ties that bind brother to brother, sister to sister, child to parent—they vanish like life dissected for. You destroy them. They have to be felt, not proved, but are more real, more solemn, more important in determining a man's destinies than all the legal bonds and moral obligations that bind him in society.