Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/673

 shrewd wisdom stood him in good stead. He managed juries with admirable bonhomie, and even at the height of the land league agitation (1880–3) rarely failed to secure a right verdict. He was created a baronet in 1885, and on 25 Nov. 1889 was promoted to the judicial committee of the English privy council, receiving a life peerage by the title of Lord Morris. Although his new duties compelled his removal to London, his permanent residence and substantial interests, as he said on taking leave of the Irish bar, remained in his native country.

As appellate judge of the privy council Morris distinguished himself by his good-humoured contempt for legal subtleties, and his witty shrewdness. He not infrequently dissented from the majority of the committee, but well held his own in argument with his colleagues. In the suit McLeod v. St. Aubyn, which raised in 1899 a question of contempt on account of scandalous reflections on a court of justice, he delivered a characteristically robust judgment in pronouncing committals for such contempt obsolete, because 'courts are satisfied to leave to public opinion attacks or comment derogatory or scandalous to them' (Law Reports, Appeal Cases, 1899, p. 561). Morris was a popular figure in English society. He became a member of Grillion's Club, and in 1890 he received the unprecedented honour of being elected a bencher of Lincoln's Inn, though he had never been called to the English bar.

Morris always took a keen interest in Irish education. From 1868 to 1870 he was a member of the Powis commission on primary education in Ireland; in 1868 he became a commissioner of national education and, later, chairman of the board. On the foundation of the Royal University in 1880 he was appointed a senator, and in 1899 was elected vice-chancellor. He was a visitor of Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1887 received the honorary degree of LL.D. from his old university.

Morris retired from the privy council and from public life in 1900, when he accepted the hereditary barony of Killanin in the peerage of the United Kingdom. He was thenceforth known as Lord Morris and Killanin. He died at Spiddal on 8 Sept. 1901.

On 18 Sept. 1860 Morris married Anna, daughter of Henry George Hughes [q. v.], baron of the court of exchequer in Ireland. His wife died on 17 Oct. 1906. Of a family of four sons and six daughters, two sons and a daughter predeceased their father. He was succeeded in the barony of Killanin by his eldest son, Martin Henry Kitrpatrirk, in whose triumphant election, in the home rule organisation, as a member for Galway in 1900, Morris played a conspicuous part.

Morris's judicial decisions were vigorously phrased and were marked by greater regard for the spirit than for the letter of the law. He made no pretence to legal erudition and boldly scorned precedent Yet his inright mto human nature compensated for most of his defects of legal learning. His popularity with his feIlow-countrymen and especially with his Galway tenantry, never waned. He ridiculed the political views of the nationalists; but he could jest in the Irish language, and his strong Celtic sympathies reduced political differences to a minimum. During his whole career, which covered the Fenian outbreak and the land league movement, he never received a threatening letter. He rather cynically assigned Ireland's distresses to natural causes — to a wet climate and the absence of coal. Local developments or improvements, which laid fresh expenses on poor localities, he deprecated. He was at one with the nationalists in regarding the existing financial relations between England and Ireland as unfair to Ireland, and spoke to that effect in the House of Lords on 23 March 1894 (Hansard [38], 1682). Though he always treated home rule as a wild and impracticable dream, he was impatient of much of the routine which England practised in its government of Ireland. His epigram on the Irish political problem — 'a quick-witted nation was being governed against its will by a stupid people' — was quoted by his friend Lord Randolph Churchill in the home rule debate on 17 April 1893, and is characteristic of his caustic sagacity (, Diary of the Home Rule Parliament, p. 108). His witticisms, if at times coarse and extravagant, usually hit the mark.

There is no good portrait of Lord Morris. A drawing by Henry Tanworth Wells [q. v. Suppl. II] was made for Grittion's Club, and a large photograph hangs in the reception room of the King's Inns at Dublin. A caricature portrait by 'Spy' appeared in 'Vanity Fair' in 1893. An engraving from photographs was made after Morris's death by Messrs. Walton & Co., of Shaftesbury Avenue.

