That our orator knew how to be sarcastic as well as severe must have been plain to those who heard him exclaim: 

“There are those who say that they are Union men, and in favor of the Government, and yet they are bitterly opposed to the administration, and cannot support its policy.  But in a war for self existence, this divorce is impossible.  One might as well say at a fire, while his house is beginning to crackle in the flames, ’I am in favor of this engine, I go for this water; the hose meets my endorsement.  Certainly, I am for putting out the fire, but don’t ask me to help man the brakes, for I am conscientiously opposed to the hose pipe.  Its nozzle isn’t handsome.  It wasn’t made by a Democrat.’”

How ardently King longed for the liberation of the Blacks is seen in the following, addressed in all probability more to the President of the United States than to the people: 

“O that the President would soon speak that electric sentence, — inspiration to the loyal North, doom to the traitorous aristocracy whose cup of guilt is full!  Let him say that it is a war of mass against class, of America against feudalism, of the schoolmaster against the slave-master, of workmen against the barons, of the ballot-box against the barracoon.  This is what the struggle means.  Proclaim it so, and what a light breaks through our leaden sky!  The war-wave rolls then with the impetus and weight of an idea.”

Closing his greatest patriotic lecture, most in demand by the public along the entire Coast, “Daniel Webster,” Starr King quotes Webster’s noble peroration in the “Reply to Hayne,” “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable,” and in lofty strain of patriotic prophecy announces that: 

“Mr. Webster’s thought breaks out afresh in the proclamation of the President that America is one and cannot be broken; it bursts forth in the banners thick as the gorgeous leaves of the October forests that have blossomed all over eighteen or twenty States; it shows itself in the passion of the noble Union men of the South who will not bow to Baal; it floats on every frigate that rides the sea to protect our shipping; it leaps forth and brightens in the sacred steel which patriots by the hundred thousand are dedicating, not to ravage, not to murder, not to hatred of any portion of the southern section of the confederacy, but to the support of the impartial Constitution, to the common flag, to the majestic and beneficent law which offers to encircle and bless the whole republic; it utters itself in the thunder-voice of twenty millions of white citizens of the land, that in America the majority under the Constitution must rule, and the public law must be obeyed.