Three reasons why H. G. Wells was probably thinking of Moloch when he named the Morlocks

Baal Moloch devouring the prisoners of war in Babylon, Henri-Paul Motte, 1876

I just learned that some people theorize that H. G. Wells gave the Morlocks their name because he was prejudiced again the Morlachs of Central Europe. I have never heard that Wells had any prejudice against them, but even if he did, I find the idea that the Morlachs provided a name for his Morlocks unlikely for three reasons:

1. The Eloi were clearly inspired by Elohim, the Hebrew name for God or gods. Because writers like to create parallels when they can, it would make sense for the Morlocks to have been inspired by the Biblical Moloch.*
2. Wells’ Morlocks are descendants of the working class. If Wells had wanted to name them for a specific group of people of his day, it would have made more sense to name them after the people of a factory town like Manchester or Liverpool or the nearest exploited countries, Scotland and Ireland, rather than use the name of a distant people.
3. Wells was concerned with global capitalism. The implication in The Time Machine is that humanity has evolved into Eloi and Morlocks. Naming the Morlocks for a regional group would imply that what the Time Traveller encountered was unique to central Europe.

*Many scholars today think Moloch was not a god, but a word for child sacrifice. Wells wrote The Time Machine more than three decades before that theory was developed, so he would’ve been thinking of Moloch as a deity.