538 MULL. ECONOMY. 



could have been occupied nor any settlement made; 

 as there was no employment ready, on the profits or 

 wages of which the settlers could have existed. As 

 a fishing station it is unfavourably situated, since the 

 uncertainty of the herring shoals, and their protracted 

 desertion of this part of the coast, prevent the adoption 

 of that variety of the herring fishery which is carried 

 on in small boats; the only one within the power of 

 little proprietors, and which, in the best of events is, 

 from its transitory nature and uncertain produce, an 

 insufficient employment. It is equally unfavourable for 

 the cod or ling fishery, since no banks or grounds 

 for this description of fish occur in the neighbourhood, 

 and it cannot be pursued at any considerable distance 

 from home in the small and insufficient boats which 

 alone are within the reach of these poor people. 



The impossibility of forcing manufactures seems equally 

 evident, although economists appear too often to have 

 imagined that the power of collecting a mass of people 

 together, was the only thing requisite for their esta- 

 blishment; or that, like the plants which vegetate by 

 the brook, they must necessarily spring up wherever that 

 brook was capable of turning a mill. Capital does not 

 readily seek for new outlets till it is dammed up to bursting, 

 and many circumstances yet wanting must coincide, 

 before a paper mill or a carding engine can be erected 

 under the waterfalls of Tobermory. As far as respects 

 those manufactures required for the ordinary consumption 

 of an agricultural district, and which form a principal 

 cement of the smaller towns throughout the country, 

 the habits of the Highlands are not yet ready to receive 

 them. With little superfluity to spend in objects of 

 luxury or ornament, or even in the more perfect kinds 

 of those utensils which are indispensable, and with long 

 established habits of submitting to the use of imperfect 

 substitutes, their want of employment for a great portion 

 of the year necessarily leads them to construct for them- 



