Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/40

 without any reduction or delay. Registration of title affords the equivalent of that sovereign-stamp.

This same argument is boldly, I would say audaciously, advanced by the Royal Commissioners of 1868, par. 63 of their report, thus: "We have conclusively shown that purchasers do not want indefeasible title;" so little do they want "indefeasible title that, for the sake of saving cost, they overlook certain blots and defects, forego requisitions, and are content with slender investigation." Surely, these learned jurists insult the intelligence of ordinary mortals when they represent as the outcome of free and deliberate choice that which they themselves admit is submitted to "for the sake of saving costs" and ruinous delay.

This branch of the subject may be appropriately summed up by referring to a higher authority than that of the learned Commissioners. Lord Cairns, in the speech which I have before quoted, says: "I can assure the noble lord (Palmerston) that we have no plan in contemplation for turning a bad into a good title. What we propose is, that those who have a good title should be entitled to procure a declaration of it." I believe that, in point of fact, there are few titles which are not good. But there are titles which, though substantially good, are open to certain technical objections that are generally guarded against by conditions of sale, and which, in strictness, are of a nature which prevents you from saying a title is absolutely good; and it is very rarely the case, in regard to any one of these, that it could not, by a little trouble or expense, be cured. At present there are no inducements for a man whose title is open to such defects to have them removed, because their removal would occasion him expense, without any corresponding advantage upon a sale. But if you were able to assure him that by some such arrangement as I have described he could cure the technical defects which now exist, and then have a declaration of title once and for all, I am much mistaken if numbers of titles liable to these objections would