Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/49

 CHAPTER VI.

committee of 1879 wind up their report with the following dilemma:—"On the one hand we are informed, on the authority of Mr. Follett and Mr. Holt, that no system of registration of title can be devised which will be voluntarily adopted; and on the other hand we are told by the Lord Chancellor that he has not yet seen any way by which registration of titles may be made compulsory. If you make registration of land compulsory, you must at once open out throughout the whole country a complete system of local offices, because you cannot make it compulsory upon a man to come up to London to register a few acres of land; you must have the whole machinery ready before the Act begins to work. That is an enormous thing in this country, and frightful to contemplate, and in the next place you must be prepared to do this at a very much smaller expense than any fees of registration have been proposed to be."

If there existed no machinery for conducting registration of titles other than by district registries "throughout the whole of the country," as assumed by Lord Cairns, the proposal would indeed be, as he has represented it, "something frightful to contemplate." But, in the first place, we have in Dublin and in Edinburgh metropolitan registration of deeds in operation for more than a century, and no inconvenience or complaint upon that score has arisen; and in the next place we have throughout the wide expanse of the British colonies demonstrated on a great scale not merely the feasibility, but also the