Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/16

 is so simple, and so analogous to the system of bookkeeping as used in banks, that all the transactions relating to a certain title necessarily appear upon the same folio, and therefore it is not necessary to search either against a man's name or in any other book whatever."

Again, Mr. Freshfield, a member of one of the first conveyancing firms in England, in evidence before the Royal Commission of 1856, deposes that "title by deed can never be demonstrated as an ascertained fact; it can only be presented as an inference more or less probable, deducible from the documentary evidence accessible at the time being."

The late Lord Chancellor, when Attorney-General, in 1859, in his speech on this question in the House of Commons, pronounced "the objections to a register of deeds to be so manifest that hardly any person in the present day would venture to propose it. It would not simplify title in the least. It only puts on a formal record the whole of that multitude of deeds and conveyances of the extent and complexity of which we already have so much reason to complain. You have to investigate and search just as before; in addition to that you have to pay for searches in the register, and also to pay, in some shape or other, the expense of placing the deeds upon it. Moreover, the costs to the country of the establishment by which a registration of deeds could be managed would be something which, I should think, none of us would like to contemplate. I believe the calculation is that in this country you must have the materials for registering a thousand deeds every day. In the next place, a register of deeds would interfere with and render nugatory a very large portion of the dealings in land which run upon the deposit of deeds."

Lord Cairns, in the same speech, thus describes the evil results attendant on the English system of conveyancing, and for which he above declared that registration of deeds can afford no remedy: "You buy an estate at an auction, or you enter into a contract for the purchase of the estate. You are