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Morley of abolishing promotion otherwise than by merit. But the association produced little result. Eager for more work, he became treasurer to the Home Missionary Society in 1858, and visited the society's stations throughout England and Wales. About this time he first interested himself in the temperance movement, and became a total abstainer. He subsequently promoted religious services in theatres, discussed currency questions, and became chairman in 1861 of the 'Bank Act and Currency Reform Committee.' He attacked 'The Drinking Usages of the Commercial Room' at a temperance conference in Exeter Hall, 6 Aug. 1862; supported the celebration of the bicentenary of nonconformity in the same year, and contributed 6,000l. to the erection of the Congregationalist Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London. He was a munificent builder of chapels, and spent on them alone 14,000l. between 1864 and 1870, and he also organised a system of colporteurs and local preachers for poor districts.

Cobden had urged him to seek a seat in parliament in 1857, but he decided, judiciously as it proved, to wait. At length, in 1865, he reluctantly consented to be put in nomination for the representation of Nottingham, where his local influence as an employer of labour was very great. Yet it was not without a bitter contest that he was returned at the head of the poll. His first speech in the House of Commons was on the Church Rates Abolition Bill, 7 March 1866, but in April he was unseated on petition for colourable employment. No personal charge of corruption was made against him. He at the time interested himself in the promotion of the liberal press, became a principal proprietor of the 'Daily News,' and caused its price to be reduced to a penny.

Although the liberal party at Nottingham had offered him their support at the next general election, he contested Bristol at a by-election in April 1868, and was defeated by 196 votes. His opponent at Bristol was then unseated on petition, and at the general election in November Morley was returned by a triumphant majority. He continued to represent Bristol till his retirement in 1885. In parliament he was an unswerving and almost unquestioning follower of Mr. Gladstone. He contributed large sums to the election funds of liberal candidates, and found the money to enable several labour candidates to go to the poll. He seconded the address in the House of Commons in 1871, when he described himself as belonging to the class of 'silent members.' But, though not influential as a speaker, he spoke often. While anxious to disestablish the Irish church, he abandoned in later life any desire for the disestablishment of the church of England. In the Irish church debates he took no share, but spoke on the Bankruptcy Bill of 1869, and moved in 1870 for an inquiry into the working of the commercial treaty with France. After half a lifetime devoted to opposing every project of state interference with education, he became a convert to a state system of teaching, but he was very desirous of safeguarding the interests of dissenters. He voted against Henry Richard's motion, 19 June 1870, which required all religious teaching to be voluntary, and expressed himself in favour of biblical teaching by board-school teachers, subject always to the protection afforded by the conscience clause. He sat from 1870 to 1876 on the London School Board, and was always a warm supporter of biblical unsectarian teaching in the schools. He also took a large part both in and out of parliament in the movements for the removal of tests in universities and of dissenters' grievances as to burials. He was on the consulting committee of the Agricultural Labourers' Union from its foundation in 1872, and in 1877 he became, and for some years remained, an active director of the Artisans', Labourers', and General Dwellings Company.

In 1880 he inadvertently gave his support to the candidature of Charles Bradlaugh at Northampton, whose religious and social opinions he viewed with 'intense repugnance.' Not only did he publicly confess the mistake, but separated himself from his party, and voted steadily against Bradlaugh's admission to the House of Commons. He was one of the first to bring before the parliament of 1880 the unsatisfactory working of the Bankruptcy Act of 1869, and he took charge in the lower house of Earl Stanhope's bill prohibiting payment of wages in public-houses. But his principal public efforts during his remaining years were exerted in support of the temperance or 'blue-ribbon' movement, and he was prepared to abandon purely voluntary efforts in favour of temperance and demand legislative assistance.

The strain of his threefold series of occupations, mercantile, political, and philanthropic, at length broke down his strength. He vacated his seat in parliament at the general election of 1885. A peerage was offered to him in June, but he refused it. He was in ill-health through the early part of 1886, and never recovered from a severe attack of pneumonia in the summer. He died on 5 Sept. at his house, Hall Place, near Tonbridge. He was buried at Abney Park cemetery, and deputations from ninety-seven