John Morley

John Morley (1838–1923), Viscount Morley of Blackburn, was an English writer and Liberal statesman. As editor of the Fortnightly Review and the Pall Mall Gazette he was the leading intellectual journalist of his generation and wrote On Compromise and lives of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and Burke. Entering Parliament in 1883, he was Gladstone's Chief Secretary for Ireland and Secretary of State for India from 1905 to 1910, when he introduced reforms that bear his name, and he resigned from the Cabinet in August 1914 rather than support the war. His Life of Gladstone, published in 1903, was the great political biography of its age.