Initially a journalist in the North of England and then editor of the newly Liberal-leaning Pall Mall Gazette from 1880 to 1883, he was elected a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Liberal Party in 1883.

[11] In February 1886, he was sworn to the Privy Council[12] and made Chief Secretary for Ireland, only to be turned out when Gladstone's government fell over Home Rule in July of the same year and Lord Salisbury became prime minister.

The Irish gentry made things as difficult for him as possible, and the path of an avowed Home Ruler installed in office at Dublin Castle was beset with pitfalls.

[16][17] From 1889 onwards, Morley resisted the pressure from labour leaders in Newcastle to support a maximum working day of eight hours enforced by law.

[18] For example, an Eight Hours Bill for miners would impose on an industry with great diversity in local and natural conditions a universal regulation.

[20] In September 1891, two mass meetings saw labour leaders such as John Burns, Keir Hardie and Robert Blatchford all calling for action against Morley.

[20] In 1880, Morley wrote to Auberon Herbert, an extreme opponent of state intervention, that "I am afraid that I do not agree with you as to paternal government.

[27] He repeatedly expressed his hope that social reform would not become a party issue and warned voters to "Beware of any State action which artificially disturbs the basis of work and wages".

[28] Politicians could not "insure steady work and good wages" because of "great economic tides and currents flowing which were beyond the control of any statesman, Government, or community".

The Unionist government had proposed to help farmers by assuming some of their rates and wanted to subsidise West Indian sugar producers.

Morley viewed these as dangerous precedents of "distributing public money for the purposes of a single class" and he asked voters: "How far are you going to allow this to take you?

[32] Morley now regretted Gladstone's budget of 1853 (where the income tax was set "on its legs") because it gave the Chancellor of the Exchequer "a reservoir out of which he could draw with ease and certainty whatever was asked for".

Morley claimed that it was no coincidence that since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, Britain was the only great country in Western Europe not to experience "even a shadow of a civil convulsion".

[34][35] In July 1902, he was presented by Andrew Carnegie with the late Lord Acton's valuable library, which, on 20 October, he in turn gave to the University of Cambridge.

Though he was strongly opposed by some of the more extreme members of the Radical party, on the grounds of belying his democratic principles in dealing with the British Raj, his action was generally recognised as combining statesmanship with patience.

While firmly opposing revolutionary propaganda, he showed his popular sympathies by appointing two distinguished native Indians to the Council of India and taking steps for a decentralisation of the administrative government.

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigned in 1908 and H. H. Asquith became prime minister, Morley retained his post in the new cabinet; but it was thought advisable to relieve him of the burden imposed by a seat in the House of Commons, and he was transferred to the Upper House, being created a peer with the title of Viscount Morley of Blackburn,[14] in the County palatine of Lancaster.

One of his last important official acts had been to resist the appointment of Lord Kitchener to the viceroyalty, pressed strongly upon him by King Edward just before his death.

Until the outbreak of World War I, Morley remained in the Ministry as Lord President of the Council, and was one of the four counsellors of state to administer the kingdom during George V's visit to India for the Delhi Durbar in the winter of 1911–1912.

Owing to the temporary failure of Lord Crewe's health, Morley led the House of Lords during most of the session of 1911, in which the reform bill was passed; and it was he who read out to the House on the last night of debate the definite assurance from King George which finally secured the majority of 17: "His Majesty would assent to a creation of peers sufficient in number to guard against any possible combination of the different parties in opposition by which the Parliament bill might be exposed a second time to defeat.

In moving the second reading of the Amending bill on 1 July 1914, he said that the National Volunteers had dispelled the illusion that the masses of the South and West of Ireland had lost their care for Home Rule.

[41] In the lead-up to Great Britain's entry into World War I,[42] on 2 August 1914 the Liberal cabinet declared its intention to defend the French coast against the German Imperial Navy.

Unhappily they broke down, or thought they had (1915), and could discover no better way out of their scrape than to seek deliverance (not without a trace of arbitrary proscription) from the opposing party that counted Liberalism, old or new, for dangerous and deluding moonshine.

[54]Morley devoted a considerable amount of time to literature, his anti-Imperial views being practically swamped by the overwhelming predominance of Unionism and Imperialism.

His position as a leading British writer had early been determined by his monographs on Voltaire (1872), Rousseau (1873), Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (1878), Burke (1879), and Walpole (1889).

Burke as the champion of sound policy in America and of justice in India, Walpole as the pacific minister understanding the true interests of his country, fired his imagination.

Representing as it does so competent a writer's sifting of a mass of material, the Life of Gladstone was a masterly account of the career of the great Liberal statesman; traces of Liberal bias were inevitable but are rarely manifest; and in spite of the a priori unlikelihood of a full appreciation of Gladstone's powerful religious interests from such a quarter (Morley was an agnostic), the whole treatment is characterized by sympathy and judgement.

According to historian Stanley Wolpert in his 1967 book: "It is hardly exaggeration to speculate that, but for the socially unpardonable circumstances surrounding his marriage, Morley might well have become Britain's foreign secretary, possibly even prime minister".

[61] After more than 50 years of a quietly secluded personal life, Viscount Morley of Blackburn died of heart failure at his home, Flowermead, Wimbledon Park, south London, on 23 September 1923, aged eighty-four, when the viscountcy became extinct.

[62] The Austrian-born classical liberal theorist Friedrich Hayek, writing in 1944, as a British citizen, wrote about Morley's reputation: It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the more typically English a writer on political or social problems then appeared to the world, the more he is to-day forgotten in his own country.