6th October 2026
“This article was previously published on Substack.com. Mark Sutherland is the grandson of Dr Halliday Sutherland (1882-1960) and is the author of Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it (with Neil Sutherland).”
Ideas so bad, you could not make them up.
Mark Halliday Sutherland
Previously published on Substack on June 22, 2026
Please note: This article includes long quotations which may signal TL;DR. I have quoted the protagonists at length to keep their quoted words in context and to ensure that the passages and sources are available for researchers. I have highlighted the essential passages to facilitate a quick read.
No doubt you are familiar with the shrill “We. Have. To. Act. Now!” and the people that shout it out. Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb), Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth), Greta Thunberg (How Dare You!) are three names that come to mind.
At first sight, when these actors appear in the limelight, they appear to be saying something new and urgent. The reality is, though, that they are merely the latest actor to don “the moth-eaten mantle of Malthus.”1
Here is a highlights package of actors who have previously played the role, leaving a legacy of really, really bad ideas, some of which are shown below:
Sir Francis Galton’s welfare state for the gifted, prognathous Irishmen. 1873.
Francis Galton’s Hereditary Improvement appeared in Frazer’s Magazine in January 1873. In it, he envisaged a eugenic welfare state in which assets were confiscated when inherited by someone “deficient in natural gifts”.
“All I have thus far spoken of would require no endowments, and yet how much could be effected by it. We may, however, expect that endowments commensurate with the greater items of national expenditure would ultimately be assigned to the maintenance and improvement of the best races of man. Our peers enjoy a gross annual income of some nine millions; and that of all other settled property, irrespective of merit, would amount to an enormous sum. It is very possible hereafter, at the time I have been anticipating, that the Legislature under the growing influence of the gifted caste (supposing other customs to remain as they are at present) would enforce some limitation to inheritance, in cases where the heirs were deficient in natural gifts. The fittest would then have a far better chance of survival than at present, and civilisation, which is now recklessly destructive of high races, would, under more enlightened leadership, employ its force to maintain and improve them.”
Then Galton outlined what appears (at first sight anyway) to be a natural process that would separate the gifted from the non-gifted, that this will lead the latter to “decay out of the land”.
Galton asks the us to take his word for it, because “it is difficult to analyse the steps by which this invariable law has hitherto accomplished itself, and much more difficult … to guess how it would be accomplished under the conditions here described”. Nonetheless he reassures us: “I should expect it would be effected with little severity.”
And then he pivots. It turns out that the kindness shown by the gifted class towards the non-gifted is conditional on their remaining celibate. It becomes clear that it isn’t a complex natural process, but a political bargain: agree to die out or become an enemy of the State.
“The gifted families would be full of life and hope, and living under more intelligent and favourable sanitary conditions, would multiply rapidly, while the non-gifted would begin to decay out of the land, whenever they were brought face to face in competition with them, just in the same way as inferior races always disappear before superior ones. It is difficult to analyse the steps by which this invariable law has hitherto accomplished itself, and much more difficult is it to guess how it would be accomplished under the conditions here described, but I should expect it would be effected with little severity. I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”
In Part 1 I wrote that the solutions proposed by the population controllers:
- increased top—down control, usually by government or supra-national bodies,
- the restriction of births, and
- the increase of deaths.
Galton’s Hereditary Improvement ticked all of those boxes.
Later in the same article, Galton provides an interpretation of an observation of the evolution of the Irish:
“Visitors to Ireland after the potato famine generally remarked that the Irish type of face seemed to have become more prognathous, that is, more like the negro in the protrusion of the lower jaw; the interpretation of which was, that the men who survived the starvation and other deadly accidents of that horrible time, were more generally of a low and coarse organisation.”
It does not appear to have occurred to the great polymath that the appearance of the Irish was due to starvation: the depletion of fat from a face hollows the cheeks and makes the bones more prominent. The loss of teeth draws the jaw and chin upwards. He offered no evidence as to how the survivors were “more generally of a low and coarse organisation”.
Sir James Barr’s use of Consumption as a legal lethal device to keep undesirables in check. 1918.
In 1918, Sir James Barr gave a speech called The Future of the Medical Profession in which he said that Consumption (tuberculosis of the lungs) did a good job of killing the unfit:
“Dr. D. W. Hunter, whose name I deeply regretted to see in a recent casualty list, said: ‘The death-rate among idiots is about ten times that of the normal population at the same age. Further, of deaths of idiots about 80 per cent. are due to tuberculosis. Now an idiot has not even the resisting power necessary to die of phthisis; he dies of acute tuberculosis, death taking place in from three to six weeks from the onset of the illness. Surely here there is some inherited lowering of the soil. There are some 150,000 (estimated) of these defectives in England and Wales, and for every defective there are from six to a dozen of his relatives only a shade better than himself. Practically the same holds for insanity, yet we are asked to believe that a man cannot inherit a soil which will remain during his lifetime permanently below the average in resisting power. Until we have some restriction in the marriage of undesirables the elimination of the tubercle bacillus is not worth aiming at. It forms a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit. This world is not a hothouse; a race which owed its survival to the fact that the tubercle bacillus had ceased to exist would, on the whole, be a race hardly worth surviving. Personally, I am of opinion—and I think such opinion will be shared by most medical men who have been behind the scenes and have not allowed their sentiments to blind them—that if to-morrow the tubercle bacillus were non-existent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.’”
Barr was an eminent physician and the president of the British Medical Association in 1912. At a time when 10,000 children died each year from drinking milk contaminated with bacillus tuberculosis, I don’t imagine that Consumption was high on Barr’s list of priorities.
Marie Stopes campaign to sterilise undesirables with x-rays to create “a new and irradiated race”. 1920.
Marie Stopes advocated compulsory sterilisation in Chapter 20 of Radiant Motherhood (1920): A New and Irradiated Race.
While the disciples noisily trumpeted that Stopes gave British women reproductive choice, they drowned out her insistence that the choice would be made by a state official.
“What are the greatest dangers which jeopardize the materialization of this ardent dream of a human stock represented only by well-formed, desired, well-endowed beautiful men and women? Two main dangers are in the way of its consummation; the first is ignorance. It is so difficult to reach the untutored mind, to teach a public hardened and deadened to callousness, and the lack of dreams of their own; even though if one could but reach them it would be possible to make them understand.
“A second and almost greater danger is not a simple ignorance, but the inborn incapacity which lies in the vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded, and unbalanced who are now in our midst and who devastate social customs. These populate most rapidly ; these tend proportionately to increase; and these are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping out its vitality. These produce less than they consume, and are able only to flourish and reproduce so long as the healthier produce food for them; but by ever weakening the human stock, in the end they will succumb with the fine structure which they have destroyed.
“There appear then two obstacles which might block the materialization of my racial vision; on the one hand the ignorance of those who have latent powers. This only needs to be stirred by know-ledge and the inspiration of an ideal to become potent. This obstacle is not unsurmountable. If one but speaks in sufficiently burning words, if one but writes sufficiently contagiously, the ideas must spread with ever increasing acceleration. Ignorance must be vanquished by winged knowledge. I hold it to be the duty of the dreamer of great dreams not only to express them in such a way that cognate souls may also perceive them. It is the duty of a seer to embody his message in such a form that its beauty is apparent and the vision can be seen by all the people. The infectiousness of disease, the contagion of destructive and horrible bacterial germs have become a commonplace in our social consciousness, and we have forgotten, and our artists have in recent years ever tended more and more to forget that the highest form of art should also be infectious. Goodness, beauty, and prophetic vision have as strong a contagious quality as disease if they are embodied in form rendered vital by the mating of truth and beauty.
“To overcome mere ignorance in others is, therefore, by no means a hopeless task, and it is the valiant work of the artist-prophet. Youth is the time to catch the contagion of goodness. To youth I appeal.
“The other obstacle presents a deeper and more difficult task. It must deal with the terrible debasing power of the inferior, the depraved, and feeble-minded, to whom reason means nothing and can mean nothing, who are thriftless and unmanageable yet appallingly prolific. Yet if the good in our race is not to be swamped and destroyed by the debased as the fine tree by the parasite, this prolific depravity must be curbed. How shall this be done? A very few quite simple Acts of Parliament could deal with it.
“The miserable, the degenerate, the utterly wretched in body and mind, who when reproducing multiply the misery and evil of the world, would be the first to be thankful for the escape from the wretchedness entailed not only to their offspring but to themselves by physical powers, uncontrollable by their diseased and depraved organisms. The Labour Party, all Progressives, and all Conservatives who desire to conserve the good, can unite to support measures so directly calculated to improve the physical condition, the mental happiness, and the general well-being of the human race.
“The idea of sterilization has not yet been very generally understood or accepted, although it is an idea which urgently requires assimilating by our civilization. I think that a large part of the objections to it, often made passionately and eloquently by those from whom one would otherwise have expected a more intelligent attitude, is due to complete ignorance about the subject. Even otherwise instructed persons confuse sterilization with castration. The arguments which to-day in a chance discussion of the subject are always brought forward against sterilization have been, in my experience, only those which apply to castration. To castrate any male is, of course, not only to deprive him of his manhood, and thus to injure his personal consciousness, but to remove bodily organs, the loss of which adversely affect his mentality and which will also affect the internal secretions which have a profound influence on his whole organization. I fully endorse the views of the opponents of this process.
“It is, not however, necessary to castrate, nor is castration suggested by those who, like myself, would like to see the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory. As Dr. Havelock Ellis stated in an article in the Eugenics Review, Vol. I, No. 3, October, 1909, pp. 203-206, sterilization under proper conditions is a very different and much simpler matter, and one which has no deleterious and far-reaching effects on the whole system. The operation is trivial, scarcely painful, and does not debar the subject from experiencing all his normal reaction in ordinary union; it only prevents the procreation of children.
“It has been found in some States of America, and as I know from private correspondents in this country, there are men who would welcome the relief from the ever present anxiety of potential parenthood which they know full well would be ruining the future generation.
“There is also the possibility of sterilization by the direct action of X-rays. At present sterility is known as an unfortunate danger to those engaged in scientific research with radium, but it might, under control, be wisely used as a painless method of sterilization. This may prove of particular value for women in whom the operation corresponding to the severance of the ducts of the man is more serious. It appears however, not always to be permanent in its effect.
“With reference to the sterilizing effect of X-rays, the following quotation from F. H. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction, 1910, is pertinent: ‘A more special cause for sterility in men is one which operates in the case of workers with radium or the Rontgen rays. Several years ago Albers-Schonberg noticed that the X-rays induced sterility in guinea pigs and rabbits, but without interfering with the sexual potency. These observations have been confirmed by other investigators, who have shown, further, that the azoospermia is due to the degeneration of the cells lining the seminal canals. In men it has been proved that mere presence in an X-ray atmosphere incidental to radiography sooner or later causes a condition of complete sterility, but without any apparent diminution of sexual potency. As Gordon observes, for those working in an X-ray atmosphere Adequate protection for all parts of the body not directly exposed for examination or treatment is indispensable, but, on the other hand, the X-rays afford a convenient, painless, and harmless method of inducing sterility, in cases in which it is desirable to effect this result.’
“Even to-day almost all the thriftiest and better of the working class, and the artisan class in particular, are already in the ranks of those who are sponged upon, and to some extent taxed, for the upkeep of the incompetent, and it is just from among the best artisan and from the middle class that the most serious-minded parents, and those who recognize their racial responsibilities, are principally to be found. There is throughout the whole Labour movement, as throughout the less vocal but deeper feeling of the middle class a passionate desire to eliminate the misery and human degradation which on every hand to-day saddens the tender conscience. The limiting of their own families to meet the pressure of circumstances will never achieve their desires. The best to-day are making less and less headway, and the inferior are increasing more and more in proportion to them. To-day we are placing stumbling blocks in the path of the little ones, and as Christ said, “Woe is unto us.”
“Directly, however, the need for such legislation as I have outlined above is realized, and such legislation is passed, then the tide will be turned. Then at last, we will begin to see the elimination of the horror and degradation of humanity, which, at present, is apparently so hopeless and permanent a blot upon the world. And then, and then at once will the positive effects of the conscious working of love and beauty and desired motherhood begin to take effect. The evolution of humanity will take a leap forward when we have around us only fine and beautiful young people, all of whom have been conceived, carried, and born in true homes by conscious, powerful, and voluntary mothers. Then at last will God’s will be done on earth and the power of Satan broken.
“Meanwhile the prison reformers, psycho-analysts, doctors, teachers, and reformers of all sorts will be going on with their reforms, and will be claiming this and that wonderful improvement in the school children, and they will probably never realize that it is not their reforms which have worked these apparent miracles; it is the change in the mother’s attitude, the return to the position of power of the mother, her voluntary motherhood, the conscious and deliberate creation by the mother and her mate of the fine and splendid race which to-day, as God’s prophet, I see in a vision and which might so speedily be materialized on earth.
Stopes sent a copy of Radiant Motherhood to Frances Stevenson, private secretary (mistress and later wife) of Prime Minister Lloyd George, urging her to get him to read it because it would “help him in real fact more than a dozen Ministries will ever do.”2
Rather than wait for the political process to deliver what she wanted, Stopes advocated the use of the Gold Pin or Gold Spring as an interim alternative:3
“The advantages of [the Gold Pin] are that all consideration of the subject may be completed once and for all, and the spring should stay in place for years. No further anxiety or trouble on the part of the woman is required, but a visit twice a year to a nurse or doctor to have the spring cleaned and examined. It is therefore, the one and only method (apart from actual sterilisation) which is applicable, and of real help to the lowest and most negligent strata of society. It is therefore a method of the greatest possible racial and social value, and should become widely known and practised.”
These were not the mere opinions of a population controller, but someone who styled herself “God’s prophet” and who claimed to be acting on the instructions of Almighty God.
Norman Haire’s infanticide. 1925.
In his foreword to Lysistrata: Woman’s Future and Future Woman (1925) by Anthony Ludoviki Dr Norman Haire reviewed the subjects on which Ludoviki and himself aligned and added:
“In speaking of the unfit, infanticide, and concubinage, your frankness is splendid, though on my pet subject, Birth-Control, I disagree with you. There can be no doubt that much of today’s “humanitarianism” only results on the wasting on the hopelessly unfit of money and care which might be spent very profitably on the fit, and in keeping alive those who should never have been born. With the decay of sentimentalism, infanticide must come to be practised on those who at birth are obviously below a (variable) minimum standard, and sterilization (destruction of fertility without interference with sexual potency or pleasure) on those whose deficiency becomes unmistakable only at a more advanced age.”
H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw’s mercy killings
I covered H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw advocacy of the killing those who did not meet the criteria to be allowed to live in Part 1.
Margaret Sanger’s A Plan for Peace. 1932.
Margaret Sanger’s 1932 Plan for Peace outlined her views on how to implement America’s eugenic future.
A Plan for Peace
First, put into action President Wilson’s fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918. Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals.
The main objects of the Population Congress would be:
- a) to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.
- b) to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.
- c) to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.
- d) to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
- e) to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
- f) to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
- g) to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.
The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.
The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strenghtening and development of moral conduct.
Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.
The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers’ health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives—thus reducing maternal mortality.
The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.
With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.
There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.
In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace. [Emphasis added]
Corralling an enormous part of the American Population … defending the unborn against their own disabilities … it’s hard to find flaws with this plan!
Paul Ehrlich and adding sterilising agents to the water supply or staple food. 1968.
On the cover of the The Population Bomb (1968) Dr Paul R. Ehrlich expressed the stark choices facing humanity very clearly: “Population Control or Race to Oblivion?”4
In Chapter 4 What needs to be done? Erlich wrote:
“So the first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.”
The “jes’ sayin’” get-out clause
Note Erlich’s use of the disembodied passive voice: the plan is “often mentioned”, but the person or persons who mention it, and the context in which they mention it, are absent. When he was later accused of advocating for sterilants to be added to the water, Erlich was able to state that he had not; he was jes’ sayin’ that it could be done …
In The Population Bomb, Ehrlich also anticipated the objections to such a scheme: “Those of you who are appalled by the idea can rest easy.”
Phew! That’s a relief! Was it on the grounds that it was immoral, unworkable, unsustainable and anti-human? No? Ehrlich said it was: “thanks to the criminal inadequacy of biomedical research in this area.”
“If the choice now is either such additives or catastrophe, we shall have catastrophe. It might be possible to develop such population control tools, although the task would not be simple. Either the additive would have to operate equally well and with minimum side effects against both sexes, or some way would have to be found to direct it only to one sex and not the other. Feeding potent male hormones to the whole population might sterilize and defeminize the women, while the upset in the male population and society as a whole can well be imagined. In addition would have to be taken that the sterilizing substance did not reach livestock, either through water or garbage.”
Following discussion of other monetary incentives, Erlich lets the concomitant cat out of the bag.
“Obviously, such measures would need coordination by a powerful government agency …”
World Government and Compulsory Abortion – John P Holdren’s and James and Anne Ehrlich. 1970.
The promotion of these extreme ideas were not a one off and they reappeared and were developed in Ecoscience (1970) by John Holdren and James and Anne Ehrlich. There is an excellent analysis of Ecoscience on zombietime.com.
Oh, they were “jes’ sayin’” as well
Ehrlich and Ehrlich and Holdren hid behind the passive voice to suggest a subcutaneous sterilising capsule, compulsory abortion and world government as well. I recommend the article on Zombietime because it is comprehensive and clear. Here are some excerpts:
“The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin [of women] and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”
World government anyone?
Holdren and Ehrlich and Ehrilch called for a “planetary regime”
Toward a Planetary Regime
…
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.
Security. What about security?
Don’t worry, Holdren and Ehrlich and Ehrlich have got that covered as well
“… security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.”
Conclusion
If you think the purpose of this article was to cherry-pick a few rotten ideas over the last 100-years or so, you have missed the point. The point is to expose the recurring pattern that continues, albeit with refinements, today.
The first is that there are people who see themselves as being above the ruck of humanity, who make a career out of telling other people how to live their lives.
Frequently they are household names, even after their deaths. They are given lavish attention in the media over long periods of time, apparently on the strength of their ideas alone. It is rare, if ever, that we get to see the interests they represent, or who funds them.
It is apparent that what these actors purport to be “science” is strongly (overwhelmingly?) influenced by their political and social prejudices, and they encourage these prejudices in others.
As stated, their solutions require radical action, increased top-down control, more government, world government, restricted births and increased deaths. It is the last of these—death—that is the universal solution.
The actors repeat their claims in increasingly shrill terms and then …
… and then …
… nothing.
When the catastrophes they predicted didn’t happen, they are never held to account. Instead, a new actor is found and they put on “the moth-eaten mantle of Malthus”.
Dr Halliday Sutherland
As I have written in earlier articles, Dr Halliday Sutherland was the point man for opposition to the population controllers in the 1920s. I will leave the last word to him, when in Birth Control Revisited (1926) he mocked the population controllers:
“… when these people discuss sterilization, they picture themselves sitting round a table and ordering other people to be sterilized. In the same way Communists, when they talk about the bloody revolution, always picture themselves knocking other people on the head, and indeed they become very angry when I tell them that the other people will retaliate. And thus do all enemies of freedom.”
Epilogue
As a palate cleanser — humour is needed after such a cheerless subject — I would recommend that you check out the work of Ann Farmer who brutally exposes the population controllers with humour at https://www.annfarmer.co.uk/cartoons (Click on the cartoon to see the entire comic strip). My favourite character created by Farmer is the Malthusian, Hugo Fearst.
