Page:An essay on the transfer of land by registration.djvu/52

 system of registration would be unworkable, and break down of its own weight, whilst the metropolitan system, as administered in the colonies, affords effectual safeguard against the danger of a dead-lock; and, further, I submit that neither in the cost nor in the magnitude of the work is there anything formidable, or anything that should be allowed to stand in the way of a system which, after abundant experience in the colonies as applied to property in land, and in this country as applied to property in shipping, has been found adequate to every requirement, and has conferred enormous—it may almost be said incalculable—benefit on the community.

In 1872, Lord Coleridge (then Attorney-General), presiding at the Congress of the Law Amendment Society, at Cheltenham, declared that he "had never been able to perceive the obstacle to applying to land the system of a transfer which answered so well when applied to shipping; but as his learned brethren, one and all, had declared that to be impossible, he had become impressed with the belief that there must be something wrong in his intellect, as he failed to perceive the impossibility. The remarkably clear and logical paper which was read by Sir R. R. Torrens relieved him from that painful impression, and the statistics of the successful working of his system in Australia amounted to demonstration, so that the man who denied the practicability of applying it might as well deny that two and two make four." If Lord Cairns had had before him the evidence referred to by Lord Coleridge, together with the supplementary information contained in the Blue Book of May, 1881, it can scarcely be doubted that he would have concurred in the above opinion.