Morel played a significant role in the British pacifist movement during the First World War, participating in the foundation of and becoming secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, at which point he broke with the Liberal Party.

After the war, he edited the journal Foreign Affairs, through which he sharply criticised what he considered French aggression and mistreatment of the defeated Central Powers.

Morel was elected to Parliament in 1922 as a Labour candidate, defeating the incumbent Winston Churchill for his seat, and was re-elected in 1924, dying in office.

When Emmeline Deville fell ill in 1888, the money for school fees was no longer available and Edmund was forced to return to Paris to work as a bank clerk.

[6] To increase his income and support his family, from 1893 Morel began writing articles against French protectionism, which was damaging Elder Dempster's business.

His vision of Africa was influenced by the books of Mary Kingsley, an English traveller and writer, which showed sympathy for African peoples and a respect for different cultures that was very rare amongst Europeans at the time.

Due to his knowledge of French, Morel was often sent to Belgium, where he was able to view the internal accounts of the Congo Free State held by Elder Dempster.

The knowledge that the Elder Dempster ships leaving Belgium for the Congo regularly carried guns, chains, ordnance and explosives, and articles which were remote from trade purposes, while ships arriving from the colony came back full of valuable products such as raw rubber and ivory, led him to the conclusion that Belgian King Leopold II's policy was exploitative and a type of slavery.

[6] His inside information made him a powerful voice against the exploitation, as previous activists had lacked his access to precise figures about the trade.

[15] In 1903, under pressure from Morel's campaign, the British House of Commons passed a resolution protesting human rights abuses in the Congo.

[17] Casement was outraged by the evidence of atrocities that he discovered and wrote a blistering report in 1904, discussing its contents with the London press even before its official release.

The Congo Reform Association had the support of famous writers such as Joseph Conrad (whose Heart of Darkness was inspired by a voyage to the Congo Free State),[22] Anatole France,[23] Nobel laureates Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and John Galsworthy,[23][24] Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle,[25] civil rights activist Booker T. Washington,[26] and Mark Twain.

[26] Conan Doyle wrote The Crime of the Congo in 1908,[25] while Twain gave the most famous contribution with the satirical short story King Leopold's Soliloquy.

In 1905 the movement won a victory when a Commission of Enquiry, instituted (under external pressure) by King Léopold II himself, substantially confirmed the accusations made about the colonial administration.

[34] During the Agadir Crisis of 1911, Morel was entirely in sympathy with Germany and opposed to what he regarded as bellicosity by the United Kingdom and France, as well as secret diplomacy between the states involved.

He campaigned for neutrality but on the outbreak of war accepted that the fight was lost, and with Charles Trevelyan, Norman Angell and Ramsay MacDonald, formed the Union of Democratic Control to press for a more responsive foreign policy (he also resigned his candidature at this time).

His political courage was praised by people such as Bertrand Russell and the writer Romain Rolland, but his leading role in the pacifist movement exposed him to violent attacks led by the pro-war press.

He was pictured as an agent of Germany in the Daily Express, a newspaper that also listed details of future UDC meetings and encouraged its readers to attend and break them up.

On 22 August 1917 Morel's house was searched and evidence was discovered that he had sent a UDC pamphlet to Romain Rolland in Switzerland, a neutral country, which was a breach of the Defence of the Realm Act.

[38][39] In his articles for the magazine, Morel blamed France and Tsarist Russia, not the Central Powers, for the origins of the war and was scathingly critical of French imperialism.

[42] The following day, the same paper had another cover story by Morel, the title of which was "Black Scourge In Europe Sexual Horror Let Loose by France On Rhine Disappearance of Young German Girls".

[42] In his article, Morel claimed that the Senegalese soldiers serving in the French Army were "primitive African barbarians" who "stuffed their haversacks with eye-balls, ears and heads of the foe".

[43] Morel declared in his article: There [the Rhineland] they [the Senegalese soldiers] have become a terror and a horror unimaginable to the countryside, raping girls and women – for well known physiological reasons, the raping of a white woman by a negro is nearly always accompanied by serious injuries and not infrequently has fatal results; spreading syphilis, murdering inoffensive civilians, often getting completely out of control; the terrible barbaric incarnation of a barbarous policy, embodied in a so-called peace treaty which puts the clock back 2,000 years".

Although he gained fewer votes than Edwin Scrymgeour of the Scottish Prohibition Party, he won the second seat, in the process defeating one of the outgoing members, Winston Churchill, standing as a National Liberal.

[56] In August 1924, Morel is believed to have persuaded MacDonald to recognise the communist government in the Soviet Union and nominations on the Anglo-Soviet trade treaty.

[61]After making this statement, Hochschild concludes, Morel's movement served two great purposes: First, they put a remarkable amount of information on the historical record ...