ABSTRACT
When John Barrington, a merchant of the city of Dublin and a member of the Society of Friends, discovered a combination of workmen against the firm of which he was a member, he was struck with the ‘ignorance of their own true interests which the workmen displayed, and he thought if they had been better informed they would not have entered into unwise Combinations to regulate Wages’. In 1849 the trustees of the Barrington bequest offered the council of the Dublin Statistical Society the administration of its endowment for promoting its lectures in political economy, an arrangement which endures to this day. During the twenty-third session of the Society, the council ‘entered into a new and permanent arrangement’ with the Barrington trustees and ‘resolved to enlarge the subject of the lectures’ by adopting the name ‘Lectures on Social Science’, which, they felt, was the modem equivalent of the testator’s intention.
