In the “Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education,” Horace Mann expresses his belief in the power of “universal education” to counteract the “tendency to the domination of capital and servility of labor.” If society is split between those who are “ignorant and poor” and those who hold “all the wealth and the education,” then the latter are powerful and the former are both powerless and hopeless. Education must be made available to all, he believes, because it is “beyond all other devices of human origin…the great equalizer of the conditions of men,—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” Access to education “will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” Mann shows himself to be an idealist as well as a pragmatist when he argues that there is a direct correlation between increasing intelligence through education and increasing the wealth of a society: “The greatest of all the arts in political economy is to change a consumer into a producer; and the next greatest is to increase the producer’s producing power,—an end to be directly attained by increasing his intelligence.”