Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/36

 original grant consists mainly of simple transfer from one hand to another, either by way of sale or mortgage. It cannot be too often repeated that the first step towards making a registration of titles practicable, is to make a clean sweep of our present real property laws: and, until this is done, any further attempt to put Australian wine into English bottles, like all other legislation which ignores existing fact, will end, as such attempts have hitherto done, in failure and disappointment." In this statement of the case the learned Chairman, like many other eminent jurists who, as Lord Brougham has put it, "love and revere the mysteries which they have spent so much time in learning, and cannot bear the rude hand that would sweep away the cobwebs in spinning which they have spent their zeal and their days for perhaps half a century," regards with distorted vision the facts on the other side, and assumes that Englishmen and Germans when they emigrate beyond the seas animam cum cœlo mutant, and leave behind them all sense of duty as regards making provision for their families.

The statement that entails are unknown is erroneous, and the comparative rarity of those and of indirect settlements is due, not to any difficulty in conducting these operations under registration of titles, but to the necessity colonists are under, during the early struggle of colonial life, to reserve their land free of encumbrances as a basis of credit. These struggles over, and they feel the ground solid under their feet, the old-country instinct to make provision for their families prevails, and settlements and entails become less rare. I have already described the procedure in both cases; and the experience has been sufficient to place the possibility and efficacy of that procedure beyond doubt. The object aimed at as regards settlement is the same in the colonies as in this country. The difference lies in the procedure by which it is attained.

As this question of settlement has been urged as fatal to