The Controversy over a Land Registry. 105 



would be a vast charge for men to be obliged to register the 

 several deeds that they may have concerning the titles of 

 their estates ; secondly, that by this means the private con- 

 cerns of one man's estate would be publicly exposed to the 

 knowledge of any other that would but peruse the registry ; 

 thirdly, that these hindrances to the scheme would benefit the 

 few at the expense of the many ; fourthly, that exceptions 

 would have to be made in individual cases. 



We shall now examine seriatim these disadvantages, and 

 see how the advocates of registration proposed to obviate them. 

 One opponent of this reform animadverts with biting sarcasm 

 on " the amount of dust that would be raised were all the 

 Statutes, Judgments, Mortgages, Warranties, Grants, Leases, 

 etc., that have been made, acknowledged, suffered, entered or 

 executed within the memory of men to be registered by a 

 certain day. ' How many Incumbrances,' he asks, ' will here 

 be registered, that otherwise might have been set up, being (it 

 may be) only given for collateral securities, or it may be long 

 since satisfied, but the witnesses dead, and now must be com- 

 pounded withal, before the owner can sell or Mortgage his 

 Land ; how many searchers or Liformers will now be prying 

 into sinking men's Estates, only to exasperate their Creditors 

 to fall upon them ? ' " Assuming that the most convenient 

 place were selected, such as the shire town, to serve as a 

 centre of the registration of each district, the writer still is 

 able to draw several lugubrious pictures of the situation, the 

 first of which will suffice as an example. He beholds in his 

 mind's eye an aged couple taking four days to ride forty miles 

 through deep clay, accompanied by legal advisers, to register 

 a mortgage worth thirty or forty pounds. The costs of such 

 an undertaking would swallow up not less than one-fourth of 

 the sum borrowed, and the result would be that whenever a 

 poor freeholder wanted to borrow a little capital, either to 

 place his son out as an apprentice, or marry his daughter, he 

 would have to pay twenty-five per cent, of it in legal and 

 personal expenses alone. In fact, to furnish a copy of every 

 deed and incumbrance at their full length would involve 

 prohibitive costs. Another v/riter foresees that if all the 



