Some Nineteenth-Century Irish Economics

Abstract

IN the autumn of I83I the Rev. Richard Whately, D.D., Principal of St. Alban's Hall, and Professor of Political Economy in the University of Oxford, was appointed Anglican Archbishop of Dublin. In October of the same year he entered on his new duties. The position was traditionally one of considerable dignity and influence; and although its political importance had been somewhat obscured by the Act of Union, I 8oo, and by Catholic Emancipation in I 829, enough of its old glories still remained to offer to an able occupant many opportunities for realising ideals other than those naturally pertaining to it in its strictly ecclesiastical sphere. Of these Whately took full advantage and for the next thirty-four vears, until his death in I 865, he was an outstanding personality in every movement in Ireland which was concerned with education and with culture. It is not necessary here to pass judgment on his career as a whole or to assess the merits or demerits of his work as a Commissioner of National Education under the Irish Education Act of I83I, which often led to acrimonious controversy; but it is interesting to economists to observe that in the school readers which he helped to compile for Irish National Schools, a prominent place was occupied' by a simplified and stimulating version of his Oxford Lectures and of his other more elementary tracts on Political Economy. One of his first acts on reaching Dublin was to offer to the Board of Trinity College (of which he became a Visitor ex officio) an annuity of fI oo for the endowment of a professorship of Political Economy on the model of the Drummond chair at Oxford. This he regularly paid until his death, when the Board of the College took over the obligation. Two of the regulations on which the Professorship was originally established are of special interest, for they largely determined the subsequent history of the study of Political Economy in