A memoir of the late John Kells Ingram, LL.D. - sometime President of the Society

Abstract

In May last, at the first of our meetings which followed Dr. Ingram's lamented death, the President paid a just tribute to the memory of "one of our most distinguished members," and to "the great work which he did for Ireland in this Society." But the observations then made were, necessarily, confined to a brief and passing reference; for the occasion was not appropriate to such a considered notice of Dr. Ingram's career, and particularly of his connection with the Statistical Society, as it has long been our custom to devote to the commemoration of those who have been most conspicuously associated with the Society's work. Since the name of Dr. Ingram must always be held in reverent remembrance amongst us, not merely as one of the most eminent in the list of our Presidents, but as that of, perhaps, the most distinguished authority on economics who has ever adorned the roll of our Society, it has been thought desirable that something in the nature of a formal memoir should be prepared for our Journal. It is hardly needful to remark that, in consenting to become the medium for such a tribute as we desire to pay to Dr. Ingram's memory, I have no pretension whatever to speak with authority on the value or permanence of those weighty contributions to the history of social and economic science by which his name is likely to be most enduringly remembered. Were the passing of such judgment the proper task of the writer of this memorial notice, the Society must have looked elsewhere for its author. But I conceive my function to be the more limited one of combining with a brief record of the main facts of Dr. Ingram's life, an account of his work in this Society, and of the part he took in founding it, together with a statement of the purpose and substance of those important contributions with which, from time to time, he enriched our Journal. In endeavouring to comply with the wishes of our Council, it is impossible to find a more apt precedent for the form of such a notice than that which was supplied by Dr. Ingram himself in his memoir of the late Dr. Neilson Hancock; a memoir which, though it defies imitation in the justness of its proportions, and the lucidity of its exposition, may fittingly become the model for all our future attempts to appraise the work of our worthiest members.