Observing these conditions the friends of the colored people could not be silent. The abolitionists led by Caruthers, May, and Garrison hurled their weapons at the reactionaries, branding them as inconsistent schemers. After having advanced the argument of the mental inferiority of the colored race they had adopted the policy of educating Negroes on the condition that they be removed from the country.[1] Considering education one of the rights of man, the abolitionists persistently rebuked the North and South for their inhuman policy. On every opportune occasion they appealed to the world in behalf of the oppressed race, which the hostile laws had removed from humanizing influences, reduced to the plane of beasts, and made to die in heathenism. [Footnote 1: Jay,_An Inquiry_, etc., p. 26; Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series xvi., p. 319; and _Proceedings of the New York State Colonization Society_, 1831, p. 6.] In reply to the abolitionists the protagonists of the reactionaries said that but for the "intrusive and intriguing interference of pragmatical fanatics"[1] such precautionary enactments would never have been necessary. There was some truth in this statement; for in certain districts these measures operated not to prevent the aristocratic people of the South from enlightening the Negroes, but to keep away from them what they considered undesirable instructors. The southerners regarded the abolitionists as foes in the field, industriously scattering the seeds of insurrection which could then be prevented only by blocking every avenue through which they could operate upon the minds of the slaves. A writer of this period expressed it thus: "It became necessary to check or turn aside the stream which instead of flowing healthfully upon the Negro is polluted and poisoned by the abolitionists and rendered the source of discontent and excitement."[2] He believed that education thus perverted would become equally dangerous to the master and the slave, and that while fanaticism continued its war upon the South the measures of necessary precaution and defense had to be continued. He asserted, however, that education would not only unfit the Negro for his station in life and prepare him for insurrection, but would prove wholly impracticable in the performance of the duties of a laborer.[3] The South has not yet learned that an educated man is a better laborer than an ignorant one. [Footnote 1: Hodgkin, _An Inquiry into the Merits of the Am. Col. Soc_., p. 31; and _The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Abolitionists_, p. 68.] [Footnote 2: _Ibid_., p. 69.] [Footnote 3: _The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Abolitionists_, p. 69.] CHAPTER VIII RELIGION WITHOUT LETTERS