relation of lord and tenant springs up; a man holds of another. The next step severs the right of property from its benefits; the man holds to the use of another. The legislature steps in, and violently endeavours to reunite the severed elements; but the practice of trusts mocks the effort of the Statute of Uses, and extends the severance between the technical and the beneficial ownership to possessory interests likewise. Lastly, the growth of powers, enlarging and systematizing the hint contained in the old common law authority, affords the means of severing the right of alienation in all its degrees from any of the other rights of ownership; so that one man shall have the right of aliening for years, others in fee, whilst the beneficial ownership shall be in a third; the actual possession being all the while in other parties, and the rights of it often as variously distributed as those of property itself. Whilst the whole vast mass of wealth which the nation has created by charge upon its revenues-the public funds-is held, as we have seen, upon

the

The separation spect of land by

attained in re

quite different

stock-registry

express principle of entirely severing the immediate right of alienation from the other elements of ownership; so that I suppose many fewer people in England have the right of solely disposing of any Consols which they may call their own, than have some share in the right of disposing of those of other people, registered in the names of trustees in the Bank books. XVII. So little has this separation of rights to say to the particular machinery adopted for carrying it out, that the same result is palpably, to a great extent, attained in respect of machinery from land by means of entirely opposite machinery. We speak of system. English landowners. Whom do we mean by the term? Is it the few holders of unincumbered beneficial fee-simples? Is it the will or settlement trustees-the mortgagees-in whom the right of alienation is vested in probably seven cases out of ten? By no means. In using the term, we speak of those who exercise the practical daily rights of ownership, generally minus that of alienation in fee; the mortgagors left in possession; the cestui que trust tenants for life and tenants in tail; the long leaseholder even, when he exists. It is by no slovenly concession to popular usage, but through a fair

Difference of system in attain

an argument of

ject-matter.

recognition of plain facts, that acts of parliament have of late years, in their interpretation clauses, admitted definitions of "owners" which include classes of persons wholly devoid of the right of alienation over the land.

XVIII.-We may observe by the way (though the remark ing the same end, would carry us back to an earlier stage of this inquiry), that if, difference in sub- in effect, the stock-transfer system however perfect, the landtransfer system however clumsy, really attain so far the same end, in separating the right of alienation from the other processes of ownership, the doubt at once arises whether the diversity in the two may not be justified by some cardinal difference in the subject-matter with which they deal, such indeed as we have found already to exist. But some little attention requires yet to be bestowed upon the particular means by which the absolute separation of rights is effected under the stock-transfer system.

Inversion of ordinary rules by

registry system works.

XIX. If we look into that system, we shall find that its easy which the stock working depends upon an absolute inversion of the ordinary phenomena of human action-the ordinary rules of universal law. The borrower," Solomon tells us, "is servant to the lender;" as between that gigantic borrower the Bank of England and its creditor fundholders, there is not a red-coated porter in the service of the borrower who does not visibly deem himself quite the superior to any individual lender. The creditor, under any system of jurisprudence in the world, retains possession of his securities against the debtor. Here the creditor is content to rest his sole title on the entries in his debtor's books. The ordinary debtor pays the wrong man at his peril, if he knows who is the right one. Here, the right man is simply the man in the debtor's books; the debtor absolutely refuses to take cognizance of any claim beyond, otherwise than by way of a caution to himself, and you may stand by and see your trustee put your dividends in his pocket, openly defying you to extract them from thence; you may protest as much as you please there and then against his receiving them-your great debtor is blandly indifferent, and pays absolutely no attention to your claim, unless it comes in the shape of some peculiar legal process.

The peculiarities of the stock

the relation of

ditor, inapplica

XX. It seems to be admitted nearly by all persons nowa-days, that without reference to the form of the registry, register flow from these peculiarities must be embodied in a land-register so far debtor and creas its character will admit; that title must consist solely or ble to land. mainly of the entries in the register, whether those entries consist of whole deeds or of the merest references to them; that the register must prevail against notice; whilst the nearer the land-register approximates to the stock-register, the more rigidly must it exclude equitable interests and claims. But these peculiarities of the stock-register, which, however abnormal in themselves, are yet perfectly simple and natural when flowing from the relation between a debtor like the Bank of England, representing, in fact, the whole nation, and thereby almost all-powerful, and at all events implicitly to be trusted, and creditors who are but individual members of the nation, cannot flow in like manner from the constitution of the land register, however closely modelled upon the stockregister, since the former, as I have shown already, cannot be based upon the like relation. You may place the nation behind it, but the nation will not owe the land which it may include, but only a paper record of that land.

Can the land

register be based

on relation of vendor and pur

XXI.-The question then arises, upon what principle can the land-register be based, so as to put into it those peculiarities of the stock-register which are the very oil to its machinery, chaser? but which are there the mere results of the cardinal relation on which it turns? Can we base the land-register on the relation between vendor and purchaser? In other words— can we transform that which is a mere incident in the stockregister into the very foundation of the land-register? To this, in truth, all the practical efforts of the new reformers have been more or less directed.

difficulty of iden

XXII.-Now, assuming the construction of a land-register The primary on the basis of the relation between vendor and purchaser, com- titication. pletely separating the right of immediate alienation from the other incidents of ownership, the specific character of the land opposes a primary difficulty as to identification. In a purchase of Consols the amount purchased is every thing; it is a matter of absolute indifference to the purchaser, and practi

Maps the only satisfactory

cation.

cally he does not even know, whether the property be that of A or B. But in a purchase of lands the mere acreage is nothing, the identity of the land itself every thing. A thousand acres of Welsh hills may not be worth as many square yards of space in the City; the man who wants arable land in Essex does not know what to do with Cornish tin-grounds. Unless, therefore, the register starts with fixing the identity of the land, it may be absolutely valueless. The clearest stockregister title to the Dale Close, without a primary identification of it, cannot prove that the Dale Close exists, or that it is not included in the equally perfect register-title to the Hill Close adjoining. Nor will this primary identification be sufficient, unless kept up and corrected from time to time. Every one knows how subdivisions of property, changes and suppressions of boundary, remeasurements, alterations of name, destroy or impair identity, mask it often when they do neither; how time itself seems gradually to corrode it. It is not only in Normandy that, according to the French saying, hedges walk (les haies marchent), nor need this be the result of dishonesty. A broad hedge-row is thinned from one side till only the outer verge of it remains, and becomes the axis, so to speak, of a new growth; the boundary line between two fields shifts with it; the "eight-acre field" becomes perhaps a rood larger; the "three-acre field” beside a rood smaller. No one takes heed so long as the two form part of the same holding; and so the process goes on until the "three-acre field" looks so small that it is thrown into the "five-acre field” adjoining, and so vanishes bodily from the face of the earth. But all this while, unless some means of taking note of these changes is at hand, the same "three-acre field" may remain on the register as a substantial entity with a perfect title to it, and may be bought and sold with the most perfect security against all manner of risks-except the one of its nonexistence.

XXIII. So long as registers are merely local, I suppose the means of identifi- difficulties of identification are comparatively little felt, or are supplied by notoriety. Hence, I take it, the small amount of practical mischief which, so far as I am aware, has ever arisen

from the lax descriptions of the court-rolls in the case of copyholds. Hence, no doubt, the explanation of the circumstance that the momentous necessity for a good land-register of a primary and constantly corrected identification of the land weighed so little in the eyes of Mr. Duval and the Real Property Commissioners. To the Registration and Conveyancing Commission belongs the credit of having brought this point into full light; and, whatever the Solicitor-general may say, it is practically essential to such identification that it should be based upon a strictly accurate map. The map is not absolutely essential in this sense, that, given exactly all the bearings and all the calculations upon which it is based, if you can put them exactly into words, you may possibly, by means of a very long description very difficult to follow, identify the land as well as with a plan of half a dozen strokes which the eye takes in at a glance. But the map is practically essential in this sense-that, inasmuch as the perfectly accurate description presupposes all the labour upon which the map itself would be founded, it is purely childish to throw away that labour, as far as one can, by founding upon it something utterly unwieldy and perplexing when compared with the map itself.

stock-register

XXIV. This absence of provision for identification of the Maps to a land land by means of a map is, in my eyes, the great blot in Mr. register on the Duval's scheme, as a register of the ownership of land intended system. to record all the processes of title. But if it be a blot in such a register, how much more must it be so in any register which should profess to be based upon the stock-transfer system, and to record only the mutations of the right of immediate alienation! The often very loose approximations to identity, which we arrive at under the present practice, are derived from a comparison of all the different elements of title, negative as well as positive; not only from leases or settlements, but from old plans annexed to particulars of former sales, from awards, private acts of parliament, and the like: they are inferred, more or less, from the mere facts of sale, purchase, inclosure, &c. Many of these sources of identification could scarcely be supplied even by the most voluminous