The Bulletin. 119 



eloquence. I really take it that you are very well informed on the subject; 

 but I am going to presume that you would like to know the details, the prac- 

 tical details, of the system, and that you would like to be informed, as intelli- 

 gent men, as to the character of the law that has been proposed by the com- 

 mittee of the North Carolina Bar Association. Of course, you are not sus- 

 picious of lawyers, else you would not have invited me to speak to you on this 

 occasion. I think you will find upon examination that this bill pretty well 

 hits the mark of what is known as the Torrens system, and that it succeeds 

 in a rare degree in adapting this system to the laud laws now existing in the 

 State of North Carolina. 



Let me discuss briefly, in the first place, the necessity for the revision of our 

 land laws. The trouble about land and land ownership in North Carolina is 

 a trouble inherent in the character of the land as property. There are three 

 sorts of property — real, personal, and mixed. We all understand personal 

 property. Money is personal property; it is yours, you can transfer it with 

 perfect readiness — sometimes with too great readiness. But land is real 

 property; you cannot move it, you cannot carry it about with you, and you 

 cannot well define its limitations. A man who owns even three hundred acres 

 of land has some difficulty in defining its boundaries. He undertakes to 

 transfer that land. In the first place, he wants a lawyer. Why? Because 

 of that very uncertainty of the character of his property, the inability to de- 

 fine its limits; in the next place, because of the difficulty of convincing the 

 other man that he has a title to his property ; and, last, because of the peculiar 

 character of the land laws of the English-speaking people— not ours alone, 

 but the land laws extending back a thousand years, involved in all sorts 

 of intricate questions and complicated means of conveyance, and necessarily 

 involved up until now, because of the high esteem in which the Anglo-Saxon 

 has always held real estate. Mr. Blackstone teaches the beginner in the law 

 that no form of property has ever appealed to the English-speaking man as 

 that form of property known as land, and that this has made the English- 

 speaking man the ruler of civilization, because land is the foundation of 



wealth. 



The Torrens system is a modern system intended to do away with, as far as 

 possible, the ancient difficulties attached to the tenure of real estate. It is an 

 effort to give the tenure of real estate more of the character of the tenure of 

 personal property, to make it more available for credit, to make the posses- 

 sion of it more sure, and to make the means and manner of disposing of it 

 (which is an inherent thing in the possession of any property), to make this 

 means and manner more convenient. Now, let us see what it does by the bill 

 now proposed to the General Assembly by this committee. 



The Torrens system contemplates that we shall enable any landowner in 

 North Carolina to put an end, once and for all, to the interminable investiga- 

 tion of titles. Now, get what I mean by that. I am sure most of you know. 

 If one of you undertook to sell or mortgage your farm, the purchaser would 

 want to investigate the title. He would employ a lawyer, and the lawyer 

 would investigate. If on the next day he wished to sell his land or mort- 

 gage it, the purchaser would again want to investigate the title. And the 

 next dav, and the next day, and so on. There is a tax on the land and a tax 

 on the wealth of the community— in behalf, it is true, of the lawyer, and 

 founded very justly, I take it, upon a demand for the positive assurance of 



the title. , , . 



You might ask here, why the investigation of the title once by a lawyer ot 

 standing would not be sufficient. If I were selling my land to-day and you were 

 purchasing, and I said, "Here in an investigation of the title by a lawyer of 

 standing " would you take it? If no other lawyer will take it, why should a 

 farmer take it? We all understand that when a lawyer says that he would 

 prefer to investigate the title for himself, it is simply because yoti have only 

 one man's say-so. No matter how great is your esteem for that man. and no 

 matter how great is his financial responsibility, you feel that he might make 

 a mistake, and in the investment of $1,000 or $10,000 in real estate you do not 

 care to run the risk of having a mistake made. 



Now the Torrens system proposes that we shall establish a court m which 

 any man may bring up his title, have it investigated once and for all, have it 



