They say and do everything possible to bring on the impending mortal combat. They never grasp the essence of the contention, for it is their mission to arouse feeling, passion, anger. They are resistlessly--most conscientiously and honestly--impelled to make the other side appear detestable and insultingly offensive in heinous wrong-doing. The most zealous and the most influential of the root-and-branch abolitionists were young when they vaulted into the arena. Garrison was twenty-six when he started the "Liberator" in 1831, Wendell Phillips was some six years younger than Garrison, and he was about twenty-six when he made his début with a powerful impromptu in Boston, in 1837. Whittier was two years younger than Garrison, and he was early a co-worker in the "Liberator." It is demonstrated by everything they said that they were entirely ignorant of the south and its people, of the average condition of the slave in the south, and especially of the negro's grade of humanity. They never studied and investigated facts diligently and impartially, desiring only to ascertain the truth. They assumed the facts to be as it suited their purposes, given them by the directors, of exciting hatred of their opponents,--and it added greatly to their efficiency that they fully believed their assumptions. Knowing really nothing of the negro except that he was a man, it was natural for them to believe, as they did, that the typical, average negro slave of the south was in all the essentials of good citizenship just such a human being as the typical, average white. If they did not go quite so far, they surely claimed for him something so near to it that it is practically the same. We shall, as suggested above, treat this pernicious error more fully in later chapters. The root-and-branch abolitionists have claimed ever since the emancipation proclamation became effective that the overthrow of slavery was brought about by them; and thousands upon thousands believing it sing them hosannas. But it is an undeniable fact that the superior power of free labor in its irreconcilable conflict with slavery was bound to do in America what it had done everywhere else. And without the abolitionist at all the days of slavery were numbered, and they were few even if there had been no secession, and very few if secession had triumphed. For free labor--its fell and implacable foe--was on the outside steadily and surely encircling it with a wall that hemmed it from the extension that was a condition of its life; and within its ring fence necessarily it was rapidly exhausting all of its resources. It was the mighty counteraction of free labor that crushed slavery. The root-and-branch abolitionist thrown up by this movement which had set forward irresistibly, long before he was ever heard of, and who believed that he started it and was guiding it, strikingly examples the proverb "Er denkt zu schieben und ist geschoben."