424 



PARLIAMENTARY PUBLICATIONS. 



[March 1897. 



from feudal times. They show the system as applied to plains 

 like the corn-growing regions of Hungary, to the busy mining 

 and industrial districts of Saxony and the Black Country 

 of Germany close to the Russian frontier, as well as to the 

 picturesque Alpine hamlets and pastures — with their innume- 

 rable interdependent rights of way, water, and other complicated 

 easements— to be found in Styria and the Salzkammergut ; 

 they pass from the intricacies of cellars and flats, courts and 

 passages, of the Jews' quarter of the city of Prague to the simple 

 conditions of a quiet agricultural district in Brandenburg ; from 

 mortgages on first-class properties, involving hundreds of thou- 

 sands of pounds, and subject to the most complicated subsequent 

 dealings by way of transfer, alteration, subdivision, and col- 

 lateral security, down to rows of petty charges on diminutive 

 shares in an inconsiderable estate ; from great cities where 

 values are measured almost by the square inch, to trackless 

 wastes and bare mountains of scarcely any value at all. 



Over the whole of this vast and diversified tract — embracing 

 an area more than seven times the size of England and Wales — 

 systems of registration of title differing in no essential particular 

 from the systems established under the Torrens Acts in Australia, 

 and partially established under the Land Registry Acts in England 

 and Ireland, have been in almost universal operation for a 

 considerable period, amounting in the principal Austrian pro- 

 vinces to upwards of 80 years, and in certain places dating from 

 a much more remote period. The type of registration followed 

 bears throughout a remarkable similarity to that of Lord 

 Westbury's Act of 1862 — every kind of interest in land being- 

 capable of registration : resulting, not unfrequently, in the 

 formation of a somewhat involved and complicated record. It 

 will be remembered, by those familiar with the subject, that 

 Lord Cairns's Land Transfer Act of 1875, by excluding certain 

 minor interests from the register, provided a remedy for what 

 was deemed a defect in the 1862 Act in regard to this. 



Notwithstanding this liability to become complicated — of 

 which instances are given in the detailed report — the continental 

 registers appear, according to every test by which their practical 

 efficiency can be tried, to be giving complete satisfaction, and to 

 enable landowners, large and small, habitually to transact sales 

 and mortgages with an ease, rapidity, cheapness, and security 

 which, to persons accustomed only to the conditions of land 

 transactions in this country, will appear almost incredible. 



The Annual Local Taxation Returns {Scotland) for the Year 

 1893-4. [H.C.— 417. Session 2.] Price 2s. 2j& 



This is the fourteenth annual volume of Returns under the 

 Local Taxation Returns (Scotland) Act, 1881. 



The year embraced in the present returns is the local financial 

 year 1893-4. All the accounts, however, are not made up to the 



