At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Britain had a population problem. The previous one-hundred years had seen it more than treble, from 11 million in 1801 to 37 million in 1901.

The wealth and power of Britain’s Empire belied the poverty that lay at its heart. The poor subsisted in bad conditions at home and, when they could get it, at work. They suffered from diseases of poverty, the worst of which was tuberculosis.

The Boer War and First World War recruitment drives exposed the terrible condition of Britain’s urban poor. Both their physical and mental states were appalling.

The main organisations dealing specifically with population were The Malthusian League and the Eugenics Education Society. Their similarities and differences are outlined in the table below:

The Malthusian League (motto: Non quantitas, sed qualitas). The League was dissolved in 1927.	The Eugenics Education Society. The Society is still in existence, albeit with name changes. It became the Eugenics Society in 1924, the Galton Institute in 1989, and the Adelphi Genetics Forum in 2021.
Well-known advocates: Charles Drysdale (founder), Alice Vickery, Binnie Dunlop. Dr Marie Stopes was a member of the Malthusian League.	Well-known advocates: Sibil Giotto (founder), Sir Francis Galton (originator), Karl Pearson, John Maynard Keynes, H.G. Wells, Dr Marie Stopes, Sir James Barr.
Aim: The removal penalties for the promotion of contraception and educating the public in their use. Origin story/underlying ideology: The League was founded after the trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in 1877. They were prosecuted for republishing The Fruits of Philosophy, a Malthusian tract written by Charles Knowlton. Malthusianism was named after the Rev Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). He theorised that population tended to increase faster than its means of subsistence. Unless checked by moral restraint, disease, famine, or war, widespread poverty and degradation would result.	Aim: The betterment of the human race through the self-direction of human evolution. Origin story/underlying ideology: Francis Galton was influenced by Origin of Species written by his cousin, Charles Darwin. He wondered: “Could not the race of men be similarly improved? Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?” Galton called his new science “eugenics”. It would apply “mathematico-statistical treatment to large collections of facts” to reveal the relative influence of nature and nurture in forming a person. In this way, it would give “more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”
Attitude to contraceptives: Malthusians thought that a restriction of the population should be through abstinence and moral restraint. The Neo-Malthusians believed the public should receive information on contraceptives. They argued that publishers of such information should not face prosecution.	Attitude to contraceptives: The Eugenic Education Society saw themselves as the advocates of a cutting-edge science. They wanted to break away from the older Malthusian League. They considered it out-of-date and tarnished by its association with contraceptives.

Eugenists and Neo-Malthusians fretted about the “differential birth rate”. This referred to the fact that the birth-rate peaked in the mid-1880s and then began to fall. The reduction in the birth rate was not evenly reflected across British social classes, and while the better-off were having fewer children, poor and working class people were not. They speculated what would happen when Britain was producing over one-half of the next generation from the lowest quarter of British society, calling it “racial degeneration” and “race suicide”.

Note that not all advocates of contraceptives were Neo-Malthusians or Eugenists (for instance Nurse Daniels, sacked by Edmonton District Council in 1922 for distributing birth control information).

In addition, even among the advocates of contraceptives, there were disagreements on which devices were safe and whether they worked.

Many believed that the proliferation of contraceptives would lead to “sex without consequences” and a lowering of public morality.

Dr Marie Stopes was a member of both the League and the Society. Her agenda was a synthesis of each: eugenic breeding would be implemented in Britain through:

• The establishment of Mothers’ Clinics across Britain, where advice on conception and contraception would be provided to married women.
• Providing, fitting contraceptive devices to the women that wanted them free of charge or at cost.
• The compulsory sterilization of women (and men) to “furnish security from conception those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or are in any way unfitted for parenthood.” Stopes lobbied politicians, including Prime Minister Lloyd George, to enact laws for this purpose.
• The establishment of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress (“CBC”) to support her agenda. Its vice-presidents were, as Stopes put it, “all names of world-wide significance” that included Sir James Barr (formerly president of the British Medical Association, Sir William Bayliss (Professor of Physiology at University College London), Dame Clara Butt (the concert singer), Edward Carpenter (philosopher and poet), John Maynard Keynes (economist), Sir William Arbuthnot Lane (physician and surgeon), Lady Constance Lytton (aristocrat and suffragette), Aylmer Maude (friend, biographer and translator of Tolstoy) and H.G. Wells (the writer). Other supporters included George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell.

Dr Stopes stated the purpose of the CBC in the High Court, London, on Thursday, February 22nd 1923:

The object of the Society is, if possible, to counteract the steady evil which has been growing for a good many years of the reduction of the birth rate just on the part of the thrifty, wise, well-contented, and the generally sound members of our community, and the reckless breeding from the C3 end, and the semi-feebleminded, the careless, who are proportionately increasing in our community because of the slowing of the birth rate at the other end of the social scale. Statistics show that every year the birth rate from the worst end of our community is increasing in proportion to the birth rate at the better end, and it was in order to try to right that grave social danger that I embarked upon this work.

“C3” was a military term that passed into common usage. It was a label for the calibre of a potential recruit, “A1” were the very best and “C3” being unfit to serve.

Dr Halliday Sutherland was a tuberculosis specialist. It is worthwhile to pay attention to Article 16 of the Tenets of the CBC because it indicated the overlap between contraception (in the broadest sense of the word), eugenics and tuberculosis:

16.—In short, we are profoundly and fundamentally a pro-baby organisation, in favour of producing the largest possible of healthy, happy children without detriment to the mother, and with the minimum wastage of infants by premature deaths. In this connection our motto has been “Babies in the right place,” and it is just as much the aim of Constructive Birth Control to secure conception to those married people who are healthy, childless, and desire children, as it is 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]

The Authorized Life of Marie C. Stopes (1924) Maude, A. Williams & Norgate Ltd. Appendix C pp 222-226.

“Racially diseased”

Establisment eugenists – such as Sir James Barr, President of the British Medical Association and Karl Pearson, Professor of Eugenics at London University – believed that that tuberculosis was a “racial disease.” In other words, that it arose primarily from a person’s genetic inheritance. Their solution was to prevent tuberculous people from having children. Dr Halliday Sutherland, a specialist in tuberculosis, disagreed. He argued that TB was caused primarily by bacteria and was enhanced by bad health, bad living conditions and bad diet.

The biographers of Dr Marie Stopes have pointed out that Dr Sutherland was a Roman Catholic. They argue that he attacked Stopes’ work primarily because it didn’t accord with Catholic teaching.

A 2020 book, Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it has proven that this thesis is false. In addition, the book reveals that the biographers who assert that Dr Marie Stopes gave women “reproductive choice” are much mistaken, pointing out that, had laws for compulsory sterilization that Stopes advocated been enacted, choice would have been made by the British state official.

Dr Sutherland loathed the Malthusians. He felt that they blamed the poor for their poverty, despite the historical facts:

The truth is that in countries such as England, Belgium, and Bengal, usually cited by Malthusians as illustrating the misery that results from overpopulation, there is no evidence whatsoever to show that the population is pressing on the soil.

On the contrary, we find ample physical resources sufficient to support the entire population, and we also find evidence of human injustice, incapacity, and corruption sufficient to account for the poverty and misery that exist in these countries. This was especially so in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, so far from high birth rates being the cause of poverty, we shall find that poverty is one of the causes of a high birth-rate.”

(b) Severance of the Inhabitants from the Soil.

It was not a high birth-rate that established organised poverty in England. In the sixteenth century the greater part of the land including common land belonging to the poor, was seized by the rich. They began by robbing the Catholic Church, and they ended by robbing the people. Once machinery was introduced in the eighteenth century, the total wealth of England was enormously increased; but the vast majority of the people had little share in this increase of wealth that accrued from machinery, because only a small portion of the people possessed capital. More children came, but they came to conditions of poverty and of child labour in the mills. In countries where more natural and stable social conditions exist, and where there are many small owners of land, large families, so far from being a cause of poverty are of the greatest assistance to their parents and to themselves. There are means by which poverty could be reduced, but artificial birth control would only increase the total poverty of the State, and therefore of the individual. “From early down to Tudor times, the majority of the inhabitants of England lived on smallholdings. For example, in the fifteenth century there were twenty-one small holdings on a particular area measuring 160 acres. During the sixteenth century the number of holdings on this area had fallen to six, and in the seventeenth century the 160 acres became one farm. Occasionally an effort was made to check this process and by a statute of Elizabeth penalties were enacted against building any cottages “without laying four acres of land thereto.” On the other hand, acres upon acres were given to the larger landowners by a series of Acts for the enclosure of common land, whereby many labourers were deprived of their land. From the reign of George I to that of George III nearly four thousand enclosure bills were passed. These wrongs have not been righted.

Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians. Sutherland, H. (1922). Harding & More, London.

Dr Sutherland also began to attack eugenics (1910) long before he became a Catholic (1919). In Birth Control, he argued that eugenics would create a slave state. In this state, the poor would have no role other than as workers.

“(c) Tending towards the Servile State.” “Thirdly, the policy of birth control opens the way to an extension of the Servile State, because women as well as men could 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 practice 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 of 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 unmistakenly to the Servile State.”

Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians. Sutherland, H. (1922). Harding & More, London.

In a 1917 speech Consumption: Its Cause and Cure he accused eugenists of being race breeders with the souls of cattle breeders:

There are some self-styled eugenists—whom you, Sir, from your pulpit have castigated as race breeders with the souls of cattle-breeders—who declaim that the prevention of disease is not in itself a good thing. They say the efficiency of the State is based upon what they call ‘the survival of the fittest.’ This war has smashed their rhetorical phrase. Who talks now about survival of the fittest, or thinks himself fit because he survives? I don’t know what they mean. I do know that in preventing disease you are not preserving the weak, but conserving the strong. And I do know that those evil conditions which will kill a weakly child within a few months of birth, and slay another when he reaches the teens, will destroy yet another when he comes to adult life.

These opposing views were to come to the fore in 1923, when Dr Stopes sued Dr Sutherland for libel in the High Court. Their legal dispute was bitterly fought and continued to November 1924.

There are those who state that the case generated enormous publicity for Stopes and provided impetus to the proliferation of contraceptives. On this basis, they say, Dr Sutherland lost the historical argument.

But did he? Certainly, Dr Sutherland accurately predicted the world in which we live today:

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.

And not just in relation to Britain:

The cataclysm which may end the eighth known epoch in civilisation may be a lack of European children.

How the book got its name

The title of Exterminating Poverty comes from Sir James Barr’s letter to Dr Marie Stopes to congratulate her on 26 May 1921: