Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

86 IJENBIiCULA.
into the country, we knew not where. We might have
wandered thus till now, always near enough to our
people to converse with thera on some quarter, but never
getting- one jot nearer. But the Benbeculites saw our
distress, brought a boat out from some hole that seemed,
like every thing else till it was tried, dry land; and, by
some means or other which I never yet could discover,
we got back to our vessel.
If there is any part of the Highlands that would seem
less likely than another to bind the inhabitants to their
native soil, it is Benbecula ; where that which is not rock
is sand, that which is not sand is bog, that which is not
bog is lake, and that which is not lake is sea. There is
no green glen here where the inhabitants are associated
by mutual wants and pleasures, no " rude mountain or
torrent's roar" to produce those attachments which poets
have sung and on which philosophers have speculated.
The grounds of moral attachment ought not also to be
very powerful in a district that is conspicuous for its
poverty even among its poor neighbours. Yet no in-
ducement has yet tempted an inhabitant of Benbecula to
leave his miserable island ; and hence that extreme po-
verty, the result of an overcrowded population, which
has reduced the wages of labour and the sizes of farms
to at least two-thirds of what they are in the neighbour-
ing ones. Every maxim is not true because it is familiar,
or commonly believed ; as Montaigne says, there are many
things " prinses a credit." The strong attachment which
the inhabitants of mountainous countries are said peculiarly
to show to their native soil, is among the number
of philosophical dogmas which have been received with-
out examination. It is believed, merely because it has
been a thousand times repeated. It is not the more true
because it has given rise to some beautiful lines in the