Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

A quiet insult hides inside Sumner's neat taxonomy: most people are plentiful because they are replaceable. "Men of routine" and compliant doers, he implies, are the raw material of any institution - easy to hire, easy to swap, easy to discipline. The scarce commodity is not labor but direction: the person who can imagine a goal, map a path, and then translate that vision into orders others will execute.

That framing is doing cultural work. It flatters leadership as a kind of higher intelligence while quietly naturalizing hierarchy as meritocratic: if planners are rare, their authority starts to look inevitable. The line also smuggles in a management credo before "management" became a modern religion - strategy and coordination as the true engine of productivity, not the sheer number of hands.

Context matters. Sumner lived in an America rapidly industrializing, standardizing, and bureaucratizing. Routine was no longer a personal habit; it was a system, built into factories and offices. In that world, obedience becomes a skill, even a moral posture, because the machine depends on predictable humans. Sumner's twist is to celebrate the ones who can step outside the machine long enough to design it.

The sentence is rhetorically efficient: it uses scarcity language ("very rare") to assign value, like a market appraisal of human types. If you're reading it today, it lands like an early argument for the modern "knowledge worker" - and an early warning about what happens when entire societies train people to follow process but not to question where the process is headed.