Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/42

 yoke laid by the conveyancers on the neck of the small proprietors had at least an equal efficacy in the same direction is capable of demonstration. To the large proprietor, purchasing his thousand acres, or mortgaging them for £50,000 to £60,000, the cost of conveyancing would probably not exceed a half per cent.; whilst the yeoman, purchasing his twenty acres, or mortgaging them for £100, might consider himself fortunate if the cost from first to last did not exceed 20 per cent. It cannot, therefore, be matter of surprise that the yeoman thus handicapped has been improved off the soil of these islands, and cannot be rehabilitated until a secure, cheap, and expeditious method—such as that by registration of titles, in operation in the colonies—has been substituted for the present system of conveyancing, which Lord Brougham denounced as "rendering the ownership of land in small parcels a luxury which a rich man may indulge in, but a ruinous extravagance in a man of small means."