One day every man shall have a stake and a share in the world’s rule and in person by reason of the vast responsibilities a world-culture is fast laying on his shoulders, and the feat of Atlas belong no more to the ancient. As education becomes inclusive, introspective, cosmic, promoting whole populations to power and privilege, it enthrones a vast, invisible, personal rule over the common mind. And this idea of personal supremacy, born of every one’s faith in community, is the pledge of its consummation. Vast problems, meanwhile, await man’s solution,—the planting and peopling of the globe’s surface, the subjugation—a still more difficult labor—of the body to the mind, planting the intellect with fair colonies of ideas, peopling the heart with sentiments of community, habituating the will to the service of the laws of human destiny.

A. Branson Alcott, 1877. Table-Talk.