Science Quote by Arthur Keith

The sentence wears the lab coat of neutral observation, but it smuggles in a full political program. Arthur Keith isn’t merely describing a “diversity of races”; he’s ranking human beings on an imagined ladder of “cultural evolution,” then presenting that hierarchy as an engineering problem for the state to solve. The key move is grammatical: people become materials. “Building a population” frames a nation as a construction site, where the inconvenient parts must be managed, sorted, and stabilized.

“Restraint” and “protection” sound benevolent until you notice who gets assigned agency. Some groups are cast as threats that require policing; others are infantilized as wards needing guardianship. Either way, Keith positions an implied governing “we” as the competent adult in the room. It’s classic early 20th-century racial science rhetoric: turn contested moral judgments into administrative necessities, and you can justify coercion while claiming to be practical.

The “bewildering Babel of tongues” lands as a cultural panic button. Babel isn’t just multilingualism; it’s divine punishment for human ambition, a story that codes diversity as chaos. In the period Keith wrote in, such language did work for empire and for restrictive immigration regimes: it translated anxiety about migration, decolonization, and working-class unrest into a supposedly scientific fear of mixture and miscommunication.

What makes the line effective is its calm tone. It offers prejudice not as hatred, but as “difficulty,” inviting readers to see inequality as management rather than violence.