Edmund
Dene Morel,
the son of Edmund Morel de Ville, was born in Paris on 15th July,
1873. Edmund's father, a minor official in the French Ministry of
Finance, died in 1877. His mother, Emmeline de Ville, brought her
four year old son back to England. Emmeline was a member of the Society
of Friends and this had a major influence on the development of
Edmund's political ideas.
Emmeline de Ville had financial difficulties and Edmund was forced
to leave school at fifteen. Edmund found work as a clerk with Elder
Dempster, a shipping firm in Liverpool.
In an attempt to increase his income, E. D. Morel turned to part-time
journalism. Most of the articles that Morel wrote were based on information
supplied by merchants and seamen who visited the shipping office.
This included stories about British trade in Africa.
At first, Morel's articles reflected the economic interests of Liverpool's
merchants. However, he became deeply concerned about the damage that
Britain was doing to African culture. This included information
that the anthropologist, Mary Kingsley,
had given him about Sierra Leonne. Morel was especially worried about
stories he heard about the rubber trade in the Congo. He discovered
that European merchants were forcing Africans to perform unpaid labour.
A series of articles entitled The Congo Scandal
appeared in The Speaker journal
in 1900. As his own company, Elder Dempster,
was involved in this trade, Morel was forced to resign.
Morel now became a full-time journalist working for the newspaper
West Africa. In 1903 he founded
his own newspaper, West African Mail,
and although it provided him with a vehicle to expose the bad behaviour
of Europeans in Africa, it failed to make a profit. Morel also established
the Congo Reform Association, an organisation that campaigned to persuade
European governments to take action against those guilty of human
rights abuses.
While carrying out his investigations in Africa E. D. Morel became
convinced that diplomats in Britain and France were sometimes
involved in immoral deals. In 1912 he published Morocco
in Diplomacy, a book where he blamed the governments in
Britain and France for the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911.
Morel became an active member of the Liberal
Party and in October, 1912, he became its prospective parliamentary
candidate in Birkenhead. However, Morel, disagreed with the way that
Herbert Asquith and his government were
dealing with the crisis in Europe. Morel believed that the conflict
had been made worse by the secret diplomacy of people such as Britain's
foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey.
On the outbreak of the First World War, three senior members of the
government, Charles Trevelyan, John
Burns, and John Morley resigned. Trevelyan
began contacting friends about a new political organisation he intended
to form to oppose the war. This included Morel, Norman
Angell and Ramsay MacDonald. A meeting
was held and after considering names such as the Peoples' Emancipation
Committee and the Peoples' Freedom League, they selected the Union
of Democratic Control (UDC).
The four men decided that the UDC should have three main objectives:
(1) that in future to prevent secret diplomacy there should be parliamentary
control over foreign policy; (2) there should be negotiations after
the war with other democratic European countries in an attempt to
form an organisation to help prevent future conflicts; (3) that at
the end of the war the peace terms should neither humiliate the defeated
nation nor artificially rearrange frontiers as this might provide
a cause for future wars.
Over the next four years the Union of Democratic
Control became the most important of all the anti-war organizations
in Britain. E. D. Morel, as secretary and
treasurer, emerged as the dominant figure in the organisation. In
August 1915, the UDC decided to pay Morel for his secretarial duties.
Morel also wrote most of the UDC pamphlets published during the war.
Herbert Asquith and his Liberal
Government were furious with Morel's actions and he was removed
as the Liberal parliamentary candidate for Birkenhead.
In 1915 Morel's book Morocco in Diplomacy
was reissued as Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy.
The following year he published Truth and
the War, an attack on the foreign policy of the British
government. Morel also wrote several pamphlets for the Union
of Democratic Control including The Morrow
of War (1914), War and Diplomacy
(1915), Our Ultimate Objects in This War
(1917) and The African Problem and the Peace
Settlement (1917).
The Daily Express, edited by Ralph
Blumenfeld, led the campaign against Morel and the UDC. In
April 1915 it printed wanted posters of Morel, Ramsay
MacDonald and Norman Angell. Under headings
such as: 'Who is E. D. Morel? And Who Pays for his Pro-German Union?
it suggested that the UDC was working for the German government. The
Daily Express also listed details
of future UDC meetings and encouraged its readers to go and break-up
them up.
Although the UDC complained to the Home Secretary about what it called
"an incitement to violence" by the Daily
Express, he refused to take any action. Over the next few
months the police refuse to protect UDC speakers and they were often
attacked by angry crowds. After one particularly violent event on
29th November, 1915, the Daily Express
proudly reported the "utter rout of the pro-Germans".
The Daily Sketch
joined the campaign against the UDC. It told its readers on 1st December,
1915, that to: "kill this conspiracy we must get hold of the
arch-conspirator, E. D. Morel". Over the next few months .
Morel was physically attacked several times. He continued to run
the organisation and by 1917 membership of the UDC and affiliated
organizations had reached 650,000.
The government now saw E. D. Morel as an extremely dangerous political
figure. Basil Thompson, head of the Criminal
Investigation Division of Scotland Yard, and future head of Special
Branch, was asked to investigate Morel and the Union
of Democratic Control. Thompson reported that the UDC was not
a revolutionary body and its funds came from the Society
of Friends and "Messrs. Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree".
Despite Thompson's failure to find any evidence of criminal activity,
the Home Secretary gave instructions for Morel's arrest. On the 22nd
August, 1917 Morel's house was searched and evidence was discovered
that he had sent a UDC pamphlet to a friend living in Switzerland.
This was a technical violation of the the Defence of the Realm Act
and Morel was sentenced to six months in prison. Morel, whose health
was already poor, never fully recovered from the harsh conditions
of Pentonville Prison. On his release from prison E. H. Morel finally
left the Liberal Party and like his colleagues
at the UDC, Charles Trevelyan and Arthur
Ponsonby, joined the Independent Labour Party.
After the war Morel severely criticised the Treaty
of Versailles warning that it would lead to another war. In 1922
Morel became the Labour Party candidate
at Dundee. In a vigorous campaign dominated
by foreign policy issues, he managed to defeat the Liberal
Party candidate, Winston Churchill.
When Morel's old colleague at the Union of Democratic
Control, Ramsay MacDonald, became
Prime Minister in 1924, some people expected Morel to become Foreign
Secretary in the new government. Morel was deeply disappointed when
MacDonald, took the unusual decision to become Foreign Secretary as
well as Prime Minister. However, Morel's advice was sought about foreign
policy and it is believed he played an important role in persuading
MacDonald to recognize the communist government in the Soviet Union.
The willingness of MacDonald to negotiate with
the Soviet Union was used to smear the Labour Party with the with
the "pro-communist" label. Part of this strategy was the
publication of the Zinoviev Letter during
the 1924 General Election campaign. Morel
rightly condemned it as a forgery but it was generally believed to
be genuine and the Labour Party lost the
election. Edmund Dene Morel died of a heart attack two weeks later
on 12th November, 1924.
(1)
Union
of Democratic Control Manifesto (August, 1914)
1.
No Province shall be transferred from one Government to another without
the consent by plebiscite or otherwise of the population of such Province.
2. No Treaty, Arrangement, or Undertaking shall be entered upon in
the name of Great Britain without the sanction of Parliament. Adequate
machinery for ensuring democratic control of foreign policy shall
be created.
3. The Foreign Policy of Great Britain shall not be aimed at creating
alliances for the purpose of maintaining the 'Balance of Power', but
shall be directed to concerted action between the Powers, and the
setting up of an International Council, whose deliberations and decisions
shall be public, with such machinery for securing international agreement
as shall be the guarantee of an abiding peace.
4. Great Britain shall propose, as part of the Peace Settlement, a
plan for the drastic reduction, by consent, of the armaments of all
the belligerent Powers, and to facilitate that policy shall attempt
to secure the general nationalization of the manufacture of armaments
and the control of the export of armaments by one country to another.
(2)
E. D. Morel, editorial, Union of Democratic
Control (10th October, 1916)
The politicians are preparing a worse world for our children than
the one they were born into. And we should be inclined almost to despair
of the future were it not that we still preserve our faith in the
ultimate triumph of reason over the national and international dementia
now prevailing, and that we believe there is a vast mass of opinion
in this country represented by the politicians nor by the Press, and
considerably saner than either.
(3)
The Union of Democratic Control (10th October,
1916)
The Council of the Union of Democratic
Control re-affirms its unshaken conviction that a lasting settlement
cannot be secured by a peace based upon the right of conquest and
followed by commercial war, but only by a peace which gives just consideration
to the claims of nationality, and which lays the foundation of a real
European partnership.
(4)
Basil Thompson, report to the Home Secretary
(November, 1917)
The
Union of Democratic Control has been more before the public eye than
other pacifist bodies, partly on account of the position of Ramsay
MacDonald, Arthur Ponsonby, Charles Trevelyan, and Frederick Jowett,
and partly because of the notoriety of E. D. Morel. It is not a revolutionary
body, and it has been appealing, at any rate in the early days of
the war, more to the intellectual classes than to the working class.
Beyond the cost of printing, its expenses are not very large. The
Society of Friends and Messrs. Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree have all
subscribed fairly liberally to its funds.
(5)
Bertrand
Russell wrote a letter to Lady Ottoline
Morrell after visiting E. D. Morel, in prison (27th March, 1918)
His
hair is completely white (there was hardly a tinge of white before)
when he first came out, he collapsed completely, physically and mentally,
largely as the result of insufficient food. He says one only gets
three quarters of an hour reading in the whole day - the rest of the
time is spent on prison work, etc.
(6)
Willie
Gallacher was one of those who queued for four hours in an attempt
to hear E.
D. Morel speak
at the Metropole Theatre in Glasgow in
June, 1918.
The
theatre was packed out and a huge overflow meeting was held in an
open space across the way. Morel confined himself to the inside meeting.
But what a reception he got. Outside, across the way, we could hear
cheering as though they wanted to lift the roof off. We admired Morel
and we turned out in full strength to do him honour.
(7)
E.
D. Morel, letter to William Cadbury on joining the Independent
Labour Party (7th April, 1918)
I
have joined the ILP and I have told Snowden and others that if they
like to put up for Parliament I will stand. I have long been gravitating
towards the Socialist position - of course there is Socialism and
Socialism, and mine is of the reasonable and moderate kind. When I
look over my public efforts through the years, it seems to me that
I have been a Socialist all my life.
So far as any Party can express what appears to me to be the country's
needs, the ILP approximates nearer to my outlook that any other, although
I still look forward to and hope for the day when all really progressive
forces can unite under the title of the Democratic Party. But Liberalism
as represented by both wings - the Lloyd George wing, and the Asquith
wing, is right outside my outlook now.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
