Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/14

 feudalism. For twenty-three years the same system has been in operation in South Australia; and the results of experience there have been such as to induce its adoption in the other Australian colonies, as well as in New Zealand, British Columbia, and Fiji.

Contrasting these four systems, we find that operating in Middlesex and Yorkshire to be generally—not to say universally—condemned as adding considerably to expense and delay, without any compensating advantage in the shape of security or otherwise. In short, it may be accepted as an axiom that any system of registration, not based upon the principle that registered instruments shall have priority amongst themselves, according to the date of registration, and over all unregistered instruments whatsoever, is worse than useless.

Regarding the relative advantages of conveyancing without registration and those of conveyancing with registration according to the Scotch method, there is much diversity of opinion. (See Report and Evidence, Land Titles and Transfer Committee, House of Commons, June, 1879.) Against that method it is objected that it does not afford adequate safeguard against frauds such as have been recently practised by Dimsdale and others; whilst it affords facilities for frauds of another class which do not exist under conveyancing without registration, a matter to which I will by-and-bye revert. Again, exception is taken to the publicity supposed to be unavoidable under any system of registration; and, thirdly, the opponents of that system dwell upon the costs and delays, especially those attendant on indexing and search, as counterbalancing any benefits attained thereby.

In reply to these objections it is justly argued that the absolute prevention of fraud is unattainable so long as knaves and dupes exist in the world, and all that can be expected from the best system is that fraud may thereby be rendered more difficult and its detection more probable. Secondly, it is a mistake to represent publicity as indispensable to regis-