has lost her veil!"
When I see a woman struggling for political preferment--trying to
force her way on up to the ballot-box, amid the masculine demagogues
who stand, with swollen fists and bloodshot eyes and pestiferous
breath, to guard the polls--wanting to go through the loaferism and
the defilement of popular sovereigns, who crawl up from the saloons
greasy and foul and vermin-covered, to decide questions of justice and
order and civilization--when I see a woman, I say, who wants to press
through all that horrible scum to get to the ballot-box, I say: "Ah,
what a pity! Vashti has lost her veil!"

When I see a woman of comely features, and of adroitness of intellect,
and endowed with all that the schools can do for one, and of high
social position, yet moving in society with superciliousness and
_hauteur_, as though she would have people know their place, and with
an undefined combination of giggle and strut and rhodomontade, endowed
with allopathic quantities of talk, but only homeopathic
infinitesimals of sense, the terror of dry-goods clerks and railroad
conductors, discoverers of significant meanings in plain conversation,
prodigies of badinage and innuendo--I say: "Vashti has lost her veil."

III. Again, I want you this morning to consider Vashti the sacrifice.
Who is this that I see coming out of that palace gate of Shushan? It
seems to me that I have seen her before. She comes homeless,
houseless, friendless, trudging along with a broken heart. Who is she?
It is Vashti the sacrifice. Oh! what a change it was from regal
position to a wayfarer's crust! A little while ago, approved and
sought for; now, none so poor as to acknowledge her acquaintanceship.
Vashti the sacrifice!

Ah! you and I have seen it many a time. Here is a home empalaced with
beauty. All that refinement and books and wealth can do for that home
has been done; but Ahasuerus, the husband and the father, is taking
hold on paths of sin. He is gradually going down. After awhile he will
flounder and struggle like a wild beast in the hunter's net--further
away from God, further away from the right. Soon the bright apparel of
the children will turn to rags; soon the household song will become
the sobbing of a broken heart. The old story over again. Brutal
Centaurs breaking up the marriage feast of Lapithae. The house full of
outrage and cruelty and abomination, while trudging forth from the
palace gate are Vashti and her children. There are homes re