Unsung hero

Charles A. Coulombe remembers a remarkable and wise Catholic convert

Many period dramas set in the England of the 1920s and 30 will mention in passing the rather Dickensian name of Marie Stopes. This lady – the Margaret Sanger of Britain – is usually mentioned as some sort of heroine of freedom. Her main antagonist in real life was a nearly forgotten figure, who unlike Dr Stopes sought to preserve life medically, and improve it, literarily. He was Dr Halliday Sutherland (18821960). Sutherland was a contemporary of G.K. Chesterton, who remarked of his writings that “Dr Halliday Sutherland is a born writer, especially a born story-teller. Dr Sutherland, who is distinguished in medicine, is an amateur in the sense that he only writes when he has nothing better to do. But when he does, it could hardly be done better.” Great praise indeed, from such a writer.

Born in Glasgow to a noted doctor and his wife, after attending High School in Glasgow and Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, he followed his father’s profession, receiving his MD in 1908 from Edinburgh University. The elder Sutherland had been Deputy Commissioner in Lunacy for Scotland, and spent his career combatting mental illness. Young Halliday would devote his medical career to poor slum dwellers afflicted with tuberculosis – which was particularly lethal among the young. Working closely with Sir Robert William Philip, he started a tuberculosis clinic and an open-air school in the bandstand of Regent's Park in London in 1911. Sutherland also produced in that year “The Story of John McNeil,” a cinema film on preventing and treating tuberculosis among the poor. At that time, around 70,000 succumbed to the disease each year in Britain – and if it was the head of the family who died, all of his dependents were impoverished.

Baptised into the Church of Scotland, Dr. Sutherland had lost his faith by this time. In 1914 he enlisted in the Royal Navy. Nevertheless, he continued his battle against tuberculosis. His fury knew no bounds when he discovered that tubercular milk was being knowingly given to and infecting children. Addressing the National Council of the YMCA on 4 September, 1917, he said: “Tuberculous milk kills 10,000 children every year and creates an amount of child sickness, suffering and sorrow so widespread as to be incomprehensible to a finite mind, and no more natural than if their food had been poisoned with arsenic. Yet in London to-day, one out of every eleven churns of milk arriving at our railway termini contains this deathdealing bacteria.” Sutherland complained that despite the recommendation for pasteurisation made many years before by a Royal Commission, nothing had been done. Why? Sutherland identified the culprit in one word: Eugenics.

As Darwinism became the leading Scientificist dogma during the course of the late 19th century, its child, Social Darwinism, emerged; with the latter came Eugenics – the idea that the human race should be bred “upwards,” like cattle. It became extremely popular amongst the Scientifically-minded – so much so that virtually every environmentalist institution or association a century or more in age has spent the last Wokerypowered two years shredding the memories of their founders – such men as Louis Agassiz, William Hornaday, Luther Burbank, John Muir, and a host of other such figures, who held these views in varying degrees. Even so anodyne a source as the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica preached this gospel in the article “Civilization:” “Equally obvious must it appear to the cosmopolite of some generation of the future that quality rather than mere numbers must determine the efficiency of any given community. Race suicide will then cease to be a bugbear; and it will no longer be considered rational to keep up the census at the cost of propagating low orders of intelligence, to feed the ranks of paupers, defectives and criminals. On the contrary it will be thought fitting that man should become the conscious arbiter of his own racial destiny to the extent of applying whatever laws of heredity he knows or may acquire in the interests of his own species, as he has long applied them in the case of domesticated animals. The survival and procreation of the unfit will then cease to be a menace to the progress of civilization.”

In his struggle against tuberculosis, Sutherland encountered opposition from the ranks of Eugenicists embedded in Britain’s establishment. In 1912, Sir James Barr – president of the British Medical Conference – gave that organisation’s annual conference some interesting guidance on the disease: “Nature … weeds out those who have not got the innate power of recovery from disease, and by means of the tubercle bacillus and other pathogenic organisms she frequently does this before the reproductive age, so that a check is put on the multiplication of idiots and the feeble-minded. Nature’s methods are thus of advantage to the race rather than to the individual.” Four years later, in 1918, Sir James made himself crystal clear: “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[.] … I am of opinion … that if tomorrow the tubercle bacillus were nonexistent, it would be nothing short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance.”

It was this callous, inhuman attitude that Sutherland castigated in his 1917 speech as that of “race breeders with the souls of cattle-breeders.” From that time on he would be the sworn enemy of the Eugenicists and the misery they caused. After the War he began reading the CTS pamphlets at Westminster Cathedral. As he put it: “The pamphlets shook all my preconceptions. Apart from their unique and tremendous claim that this was the one true infallible Church of God, I discovered that most of what I had hitherto heard or thought about the Church was false. I discovered that this Church, accredited with superstition and idolatry, was apparently engaged in upholding the dignity of human reason in a world of chaos. Nay, more, it seemed as if my own Protestantism, and the weakness thereof, had been based on sentiment and emotion, two attributes of mind on which Rome held a tight reign. It was also apparent that God could not have approved a hundred different sects, each declaring the others to be wrong. There could only be one Truth and one true Church.” In 1919, he converted to Catholicism at London’s Farm Street Church; a year later he married Muriel Fitzpatrick with whom he would have six children. He also continued to fight TB in various governmental medical posts.

In the meantime, two female eugenicists, the American Margaret Sanger and the Scottish Marie Stopes had met in 1913. Both saw artificial birth control as a kinder means of accomplishing what Sir James had wished to do through disease and death. In 1920, each set up birth control clinics in New York and London respectively, and did their very best to lure “unfit” mothers to avail themselves of their services. Stopes founded an organisation to this end dubbed the “Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.” Two years later, Sutherland wrote a pamphlet entitled Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo Malthusians. It is a brilliant explosion of the theories old and new of the socall “population explosion.” In it, he shows – a la Chesterton and Belloc –the Enclosures had driven Englishmen off the land and into the cities, where they became the urban mob that staffed the factories of the nascent Industrial Revolution – and suffered the grinding poverty Sutherland had spent so much time combatting. As Paul VI and others would point out decades later, it was not numbers that were the problem, but mismanagement and greed on the part of Society’s masters. He then – without mentioning her name – attacked the evil work that Marie Stopes was doing at her clinic.

She sued him for libel; over the next few years he would win the case, she won the appeal, and he at last triumphed in the House of Lords. But although Sutherland was victorious, Stopes and her American Coven-sister were not stopped; in our time Contraception is a secular Sacrament, with the terrible results in terms of population loss that he predicted: “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 of Stopes and Halliday: legal battles war, of politics, or of disease, are of little moment. Attempts have already been made to avert the consequences by the partial endowment of motherhood and by a saving of infant life. Physiologists are now seeking among the endocrinous glands and the vitamines [sic] 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 to-morrow.” Our leaders’ attempts to make up for that with massive immigration and the like is bearing mixed results.

But Sutherland continued his primarily rather jolly way. In addition to medical works, he wrote a very successful autobiography, The Arches ofYears,in 1933, and a host of extremely engaging travel books. I discovered him when a teenager by reading some of these. Although not meant as didactic works, his keen understanding of human nature was never far away. Describing a visit to the most Protestant Scottish Island of Lewis, he remarked: “In the main, the people of the island are Calvinists and regular churchgoers. Dressed in the deepest black, they go to church on Sabbaths and sometimes on week-days. Whenever I saw these little groups coming along the roads on their way to worship, the thought always came to me: where is the corpse? For the youth of the island, dancing, music, or gay dresses were taboo. These things were sinful. Many of the old women would sit in their chairs groaning aloud for hours. That was sanctity. Apart altogether from dogma, this attitude towards life is the antithesis of Catholicism. The Catholic Church knows and has named every sin that the human heart can commit, and there is one sin defined as ‘Accidia’ — taking a delight in being miserable.” By way of contrast, “In South Uist, one of the islands of the Outer Hebrides, are people of the same race, but there the girls wear coloured dresses, and there is dancing, singing and bagpipes. South Uist is Catholic, and I do not think that the extraordinary difference between the people of these two islands can be explained otherwise than as a difference in their faith. At its worst Catholicism is human; at its best Calvinism is inhuman.”

A far-ranging voyager, Sutherland took his readers to Lapland, the Hebrides, Australia, Spain, Ireland, and elsewhere. In the last-named country, he fell somewhat foul of the local hierarchy because of critical remarks he wrote in the first draught of Irish Journey. Here he criticised the Magdalene Laundries which later came under such scrutiny, and the Irish secular clergy in general: “In 1955 I wrote Irish Journey and this book has been damned by faint praise from every newspaper critic in Ireland. I was not surprised, because all the critics have ignored my main criticism, which concerns the Irish secular clergy. In my opinion they have too much political power. They hold themselves aloof from their people, and are too fond of money… If Ireland goes communist within the next ten years, I think the secular clergy will be to blame.”Well, it took longer than ten years, and it is not to Communism per se which Ireland has fallen victim; but I do not think Sutherland would have been too surprised to see the results of the abortion and gay marriage referenda in Ireland. Heart-broken, to be sure, but not surprised.

Indeed, a surprising amount of prescience runs throughout his writings. In his second autobiographical volume, A Time to Keep (1934), Sutherland opines that, “Without religion we know nothing of the purpose of life or of what happens after death. If there be no God there can be no religion, or if God is unknowable there can be no religion. This last is modern paganism. There is a God, but He has never made any revelation of His will to anyone, and all codes of morality were invented by man as a social convenience.” He did not simply understand the real nature of Eugenics – he understood the nature of Modernity itself. This is a very good time to rediscover this wise Catholic convert, and we are fortunate that his Australian grandson, Mark Halliday both maintains an extremely detailed website dedicated to his grandfather (hallidaysutherland.com/) and has co-authored with his brother Neil a fascinating book on their forebears’ struggle with Marie Stopes and her ilk, Exterminating Poverty: The true story oftheeugenicplantogetridofthepoor and the Scottish doctor who fought against it. Sutherland was truly a hero we need to rediscover.