 Sutherland did a large amount of literary work.He was responsible for the first volume only of "Victoria and its Metropolis", published in 1888, an interesting history of the first 50 years of the state of Victoria.In 1890 he published "Thirty Short Poems", the cultured verse of an experienced literary man, but his most important book was "The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct", which appeared in 1898 in two volumes.