1st October 2026
Written by Mark Halliday Sutherland
Published on his site 8th June 2026
Dr Halliday Sutherland hated the doctrine that made the poverty of the masses a natural law
By Mark H. Sutherland[1]
“Malthusianism” isn’t a word that fills people with dread, nor one that makes for compelling headlines. Nonetheless, it is a concept that has had, and continues to have, a disastrous impact.
To the extent that people are aware of it, Malthusianism asserts that the materials and resources in the world are limited while the number of humans is potentially unlimited. From this it follows that unless comprehensive action is taken, humanity is doomed to undergo the Malthusian catastrophe of war, pestilence and famine.
The idea appeals to many people because it makes intuitive sense. The crush on their train, held up in traffic jams or (less frequently) a visit to a casualty ward of an NHS hospital – all these are reminders that they live in an overcrowded world. As a result, it doesn’t draw much attention, let alone warrant a challenge. Malthusians – though they are not badged as such – are invariably presented by the media as thoughtful, kindly visionaries striving to save humanity from itself and even “saving the planet.”
How my interest started
In 1922 Dr Halliday Sutherland’s book Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians was published.[2] It drew a writ for libel from Marie Stopes. Their legal battle continued for two-and-a-half years. He won in the High Court in March 1923, she won in the Court of Appeal in July of the same year, and he won in the House of Lords in November 1924. Dr Sutherland was my grandfather, so naturally I sought information about the case. The most abundant sources were the many biographies of Stopes which fed the accepted history, the gist of which is:
· Stopes opened the Mothers’ Clinic, Britain’s first family planning clinic, in March 1921 to give women better access to birth control;
· Sutherland, a convert to Roman Catholicism, accused her of “exposing the poor to experiment.”
· Stopes was compelled to defend herself from the accusation that she was performing experiments on poor people.
It is an archetypal story of a feminist campaigner who tries to help her poorer sisters and is viciously attacked by Roman Catholic patriarchs. When I investigated further though, I found that the accepted history was a patchwork of true facts that presented a lie. I call this the “Catholics against Contraceptives” schema.2
Using both Stopes’ and Sutherland’s personal papers, court documents and the transcript of the trial, I added the true facts that had been omitted, minimised or obfuscated in the biographies of Stopes. These included:
· Stopes’ membership of the Malthusian League (motto: Non Quantitas Sed Qualitas) and the Eugenics Education Society. Her 1918 book Married Love was facilitated by the League’s Secretary, Binnie Dunlop, who arranged the financing of its publication.
· Stopes’ goal was “to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood” [emphasis added] through the provision of contraceptives to poor and working-class women. The motto of the Mothers’ Clinic “Babies in the right place” aimed at a “reduction of the birth rate at the wrong end of the social scale and increase of the birth rate at the right end of the social scale.”3
· Sutherland’s role in the forefront in the fight against tuberculosis, a disease of poverty that killed 70,000 and disabled 150,000 Britons each year. Mainstream eugenicists regarded Consumption (tuberculosis of the lungs) as a racial disease, primarily caused by a person’s genetic inheritance. In contrast, Sutherland argued that Consumption was primarily an infectious condition. Mainstream eugenicists thought that the efforts of doctors such as Dr Sutherland to prevent and cure tuberculosis was dysgenic because it promoted the survival and propagation of the so-called “unfit”.
· Sir James Barr, a prominent supporter of Stopes, expressed the mainstream eugenic view when he said that Consumption formed: “a rough, but on the whole very serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit” and that, for this reason, the disappearance of tuberculosis would be “nothing short of a national calamity.”4
· Stopes’ campaigned for an Act of Parliament to compulsorily sterilise those she referred to as “parasites” whose children were “the spawn of drunkards”.
It becomes apparent that the issues at play in the case were far wider than the simplistic “Catholics against Contraceptives” schema. By portraying Dr Sutherland as a zealous Catholic, the biographers of Stopes were able to omit, downplay of obfuscate how central Neo-Malthusian and eugenic ideas were to her work.
A side effect was that Sutherland’s brave public opposition to these then-fashionable movements was removed from the historical record. It was this, and the discovery of grotesque lies about him, that led me to try to correct the historical record. I set up the hallidaysutherland.com website and writing Exterminating Poverty (published in 2020).
Now back to the point of this article: What was it that Sutherland found so offensive?
Thomas Robert Malthus
Sutherland set out his comprehensive refutation of Malthusianism in Birth Control.
The Rev. Thomas Malthus, M.A., in 1798 published his Essay on the Principle of Population. His pamphlet was an answer to Condorcet and Godwin, who held that vice and poverty were the result of human institutions and could be remedied by an even distribution of property. Malthus, on the other hand, believed that population increased more rapidly than the means of subsistence, and consequently that vice and poverty were always due to overpopulation and not to any particular form of society or of government. He stated that owing to the relatively slow rate at which the food supply of countries was increased, a high birth-rate inevitably led to all the evils of poverty, war, and high death-rates. In an infamous passage he wrote that there was no vacant place for the superfluous child at Nature’s mighty feast ; that Nature told the child to be gone ; and that she quickly executed her own order. This passage was modified in the second, and deleted from the third edition of the Essay. In later editions he maintained that vice and misery had checked population, that the progress of society might have diminished rather than increased the “evils resulting from the principle of population,” and that by “moral restraint “overpopulation could be prevented.”
…
In order to avoid the evils of overpopulation, Malthus advised people not to marry, or, if they did, to marry late in life and to limit the number of their children by the exercise of self-restraint. He reprobated all artificial and unnatural methods of birth control as immoral, and as removing the necessary stimulus to industry; but he failed to grasp the whole truth that an increase of population is necessary as a stimulus not only to industry, but also as essential to man’s moral and intellectual progress.
The Neo-Malthusians
The Malthusian League accept the theory of their revered teacher, but, curiously enough, they reject his advice “as being impracticable and productive of the greatest possible evils to health and morality.” On the contrary, they advise universal early marriage, combined with artificial birth control. Although their policy is thus in flat contradiction to the policy of Malthus, there are two things common to both. Each is based on the same fallacy, and the aim of both is wide of the mark. Indeed, the Neo-Malthusian, like Malthus, has “a mist of speculation over his facts, and a vapour of fact over his ideas.” Moreover, as will be shown here, the path of the Malthusian League, although at first glance an easy way out of many human difficulties, is in reality the broad road along which a man or a nation travels to destruction ; and as guides the Neo-Malthusians are utterly unsafe, since they argue from (a) false premises to (b) false deductions.
In the remaining nine chapters, Sutherland delivered a root and branch rejection of Malthus’ doctrine.
In particular, he attacked the suggestion that artificial birth control was the answer, calling it:
A Quack Remedy for Poverty
Artificial birth control is one of the many quack remedies advertised for the cure of poverty, and G. K. Chesterton has given the final answer to the Malthusian assertion that some form of birth control is essential because houses are scarce:
“Consider that simple sentence, and you will see what is the matter with the modern mind. I do not mean the growth of immorality; I mean the genesis of gibbering idiocy. There are ten little boys whom you wish to provide with ten top-hats; and you find there are only eight top-hats. To a simple mind it would seem not impossible to make two more hats; to find out whose business it is to make hats, and induce him to make hats; to agitate against an absurd delay in delivering hats; to punish anybody who has promised hats and failed to provide hats. The modern mind is that which says that if we only cut off the heads of two of the little boys, they will not want hats; and then the hats will exactly go round. The suggestion that heads are rather more important than hats is dismissed as a piece of mystical metaphysics. The assertion that hats were made for heads, and not heads for hats savours of antiquated dogma. The musty text which says that the body is more than raiment; the popular prejudice which would prefer the lives of boys to the mathematical arrangement of hats, — all these things are alike to be ignored. The logic of enlightenment is merciless; and we duly summon the headsman to disguise the deficiencies of the hatter. For it makes very little difference to the logic of the thing, that we are talking of houses and not of hats …. The fundamental fallacy remains the same; that we are beginning at the wrong end, because we have never troubled to consider at what end to begin.”
The creation of a Servile State
The passage that was the subject of the libel dispute with Stopes has been published many times. The paragraph that followed has not. In it, Sutherland suggested that “the policy of birth control opens the way to an extension of the Servile State”:5
… the policy of birth control opens the way to an extension of the Servile State, because women as well as men could then be placed under conditions of economic slavery. Hitherto, the rule has been that during child-bearing age a woman must be supported by her husband, and the general feeling of the community has been opposed to any conditions likely to force married women on to the industrial market. In her own home a woman works hard, but she is working for the benefit of her family and not directly for the benefit of a stranger. If, instead of bearing children, women practise birth control, and if children are to be denied to the poor as a privilege of the rich, then it would be very easy to exploit the women of the poorer classes. If women have no young children why should they be exempt from the economic pressure that is applied to men? And indeed, where birth control is practised women tend more and more to supplant men, especially in ill-paid grades of work. One of the birth controllers has suggested that young couples, who otherwise could not afford to marry, should marry but have no children, and thus continue to work at their respective employments during the day. As the girl would have little time for cooking and other domestic duties, this immoralist is practically subverting the very idea of a home! The English poor have already lost even the meaning of the word “property,” and if the birth controllers had their way the meaning of the word “home” would soon follow. The aim of birth control is generally masked by falsehood, but the urging of this policy on the poor points unmistakably to the Servile State. [emphasis added]
Sutherland particularly loathed Malthusianism because it created a natural law.
The Poverty of the Masses is a Natural Law
Both the supporters and the opponents of Malthus are often mistaken in considering his greatest achievement to be a policy of birth control. Malthus did a greater and a more evil thing. He forged a law of nature, namely, that there is always a limited and insufficient supply of the necessities of life in the world. From this false law he argued that, as population increases too rapidly, the newcomers cannot hope to find a sufficiency of good things; that the poverty of the masses is not due to conditions created by man, but to a natural law; and that consequently this law cannot be altered by any change in political institutions. This new doctrine was eagerly adopted by the rich, who were thus enabled to argue that Nature intended that the masses should find no room at her feast; and that therefore our system of industrial capitalism was in harmony with the Will of God. Most comforting dogma! Most excellent anodyne for conscience against acceptance of those rights of man that, being ignored, found terrible expression in the French Revolution! Without discussion, without investigation, and without proof, our professors, politicians, leader-writers, and even our well-meaning socialists, have accepted as true the bare falsehood that there is always an insufficient supply of the necessities of life; and to-day this heresy permeates all our practical politics. In giving this forged law of nature to the rich, Malthus robbed the poor of hope. Such was his crime against humanity. In the words of Thorold Rogers, Malthusianism was part and parcel of “a conspiracy, conceived by the law and carried out by parties interested in its success, to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into immediate poverty.” When Malthusians enter a slum for the purpose of preaching birth control, it is right that the people should be told what is written on the passports of these strangers.
Real world consequences
On page 70 of Birth Control, Dr Sutherland wrote that: “Moral catastrophes inevitably lead to physical catastrophes,” in other words, morality has real-world consequences:6
When Malthusians cite the Irish famines as proof of over-population, the falsity of their argument is revealed. In 1727 the population of Ireland was about two millions, the birth-rate about 50 per thousand, and the people were in abject misery. It was then that Swift, master of satire, proposed as a remedy for the over-population of Ireland, that the English people should cultivate a taste for roasted Irish babies, and thus bring delicacies to England and prosperity to Ireland. In 1838, when the population of Ireland was about eight millions, McCulloch [quoted by Henry George, Progress and Poverty, p 95] stated that the poverty of the Irish people was due to density of population, and that the population was more than double that which the country “with its existing means of production” could support in comfort. A blacker economic lie was never told. It was neither the imprudence nor the high birth-rate of the Irish people that made them choose the potato as their staple food, but the certain knowledge that if they produced anything else, it would be taken from them to pay the rackrents of absentee landlords, themselves in the hands of London Jews. Even during her famine, Ireland was a food-exporting country, and “the existing means of production” were capable of supporting a larger population than the country then contained. “Even during the famine, grain and meat and butter and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the starving, and past trenches into which the dead were piled.” [Henry George. Progress and Poverty, p. 94]
The End of European Civilisation
Sutherland railed against the destructiveness of Malthusianism in the conclusion to Birth Control:
Our declining birth-rate is a fact of the utmost gravity, and a more serious position has never confronted the British people. Here in the midst of a great nation, at the end of a victorious war, the law of decline is working, and by that law the greatest empires in the world have perished. In comparison with that single fact all other dangers, be they war, of politics, or of disease, are of little moment. Attempts have already been made to avert the consequences by partial endowment of motherhood and by saving infant life. Physiologists are now seeking the endocrinous glands and the vitamins for a substance to assist procreation. ‘Where are my children?’ was the question shouted yesterday from the cinemas. ‘Let us have children, children at any price,’ will be the cry of tomorrow.
And all these thoughts were once in the mind of Augustus, Emperor of the world from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Mount Atlas to the Danube and the Rhine. The Catholic Church has never taught that ‘an avalanche of children’ should be brought into the world regardless of consequences. God is not mocked; as men sow, so shall they reap, and against a law of nature both the transient amelioration wrought by philanthropists and the subtle expediences of scientific politicians are alike futile. If our civilisation is to survive we must abandon those ideals that lead to decline. There is only one civilisation immune from decay, and that civilisation endures on the practical eugenics once taught by a united Christendom and now expounded almost solely by the Catholic Church.”
In 1928 Dr Sutherland predicted: “The cataclysm which may end the eighth known epoch in civilisation may be a lack of European children.” It may have seemed fanciful when he made it, but many of us will recognise the world in which we live.7
