The security of landed settlements is of paramount importance. The question, then, lies between an official investigator, in the character of a registrar or a judge, and a private investigation by the parties concerned. To suppose that, because private investigations of this nature are sometimes attended with delay, therefore official investigations are to be preferred, is to act contrary to every-day experience. You might as well try to ease the traffic of London by compelling all carriages to pass by the Mansion House for the official inspection of the Lord Mayor. Where there is only one channel, one single stoppage blocks up the whole. Because there are often arrears of business in private offices, is that a reason why the whole conveyancing business of the country should be thrust upon some unfortunate registrar or judge? Before he grants his certificates of title, he must investigate the state of each family; and so far from avoiding delay, delay would be increased an hundredfold. Some care and enquiry, and therefore expense, must be incurred on the part of purchasers. And within reasonable limits it is better that it should be so. A forged purchase deed is now scarcely ever heard of; whereas the losses sustained by the Bank from forged transfers of stock (transfers which give the purchaser no trouble) have in some years, notwithstanding all their precautions, amounted to large sums. When lands are sold, the parties now meet and see one another. They do not trust everything to an official; and by acting on the simple principle of each person looking after his own affairs, more expedition and safety as well as economy will, in the long run, be found to arise, than can possibly be expected from the exertions of officials having no direct interest in the matter, and like other human beings unable to attend to more than one thing at a time.

On the whole, it cannot be said that the alterations I have suggested are inconsiderable. At the same time they take away from the landowner no power or protection he has hitherto enjoyed. They introduce no new and untried prin

ciple. The ad valorem payment of solicitors has worked well in Scotland; the printing of bills in Chancery has saved great expense; registries of deeds prevail throughout Christendom. The duties of an executor or administrator are well defined. Charges of money, irrespective of estates in the land charged, have long existed in equity. The changes I have suggested chiefly consist in the excision of clumsy and antiquated rules. The most serious objection will perhaps bethe expense of the registries which it is proposed to establish. The expense, however, of the existing registries in Middlesex and Yorkshire has not been found oppressive. The registrars would not be an expensive class. Unlike the officials required for any scheme of registration of title, they need not be more than persons of ordinary intelligence. Their duties would be simply ministerial. They would be merely required to receive, register and index the deeds sent in to them according to a prescribed form. They would have no discretionary or judicial power. On the whole, therefore, I venture to submit for your consideration the above suggestions. I believe they contain the true remedies for the evils which affect the transfer of land. Though but suggestions, each one is more or less dependent on the other; and I think that the scheme now proposed should either be rejected altogether, or accepted as a whole. If accepted, I need not say that it would require the utmost care and deliberation in the attempt to pass it into law.

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XXXI.-THE PRINCIPLES AND RULES OF NEUTRALITY-THE FOREIGN ENLISTMENT ACT-THE ALABAMA.-By W. W. KERR, Esq., BARRISTER-AT-LAW.

(Read on the 9th February, 1863.)

THE questions which arise under the Foreign Enlistment Act cannot be understood without a knowledge of the principles which lie at the root of the whole system of international law. Like municipal law, international law is a branch of a higher and a nobler law. The moral law is the fountain. head from which the principles of both systems of law are derived. "The duties of men and of states," said Sir James Mackintosh, "are all parts of one consistent system of universal morality." "We must not," says Kent, "separate the science of public law from that of ethics, nor encourage the dangerous suggestion that governments are not so strictly bound by the obligations of truth, justice, and humanity in relation to other powers, as they are in the management of their own local concerns. States or bodies politic are to be considered as moral persons, having a public will, capable and free to do right and wrong, inasmuch as they are collections of individuals, each of whom carries with him into the service of the community the same binding law of morality and religion, which ought to control his conduct in private life." "We have," he says in another place, "the authority of the lawyers of antiquity, and of some of the first masters in the modern school of public law, for placing the moral obligation of nations and of individuals on similar grounds, and for considering individual and national morality as parts of one and the same science." "It may be affirmed," says Story, in delivering judgment in the Circuit Court of the U.S., in La Jeune Eugénie, 2 Mas. 448, a famous slave trade case, "that every doctrine that may be fairly deduced by correct reasoning

from the rights and duties of nations, and the nature of moral obligations, may theoretically be said to exist in the laws of nations." The rules of morality, in a word, which are applicable to men as individuals, are applicable also to them in their collective capacity as a people. The theory is at the present day not only undisputed, but it has acquired the force of a maxim. Of the different names which have been employed by jurists to denote the primary law of moral obligation, which is founded on the eternal and unchangeable principles of right and justice, and which should in theory regulate the conduct of nations in their dealings with each other, the term international morality seems on the whole the most appropriate, keeping, as it does, in view, the relation in respect of moral obligations which subsists between men as individuals, and that which subsists between men in their collective capacity as nations. The relation which international law bears to international morality, is analogous to that which municipal law bears to morals or the ethical system.

Municipal law is properly a branch of ethics; its conformity with that higher rule of conduct is the test by which the soundness and wisdom of municipal law must be measured. When an ordinance or a statute is not in accordance with the ethical system it cannot be accepted as sound in principle by the philosophic lawyer. The infirmities and the imperfections of man's nature are the grounds for the enactments of positive municipal law. The knowledge of his duty by man is not sufficient to ensure its performance by him. Civilisation is not yet sufficiently advanced, and will in all probability never attain so ideal a state of perfection, as to enable a nation to hold together under a system where the conscience of the individual and the voice of public opinion shall be the sole controlling forces. The rough hand of positive law is required to prevent society from sinking into a state of dissolution. The moral sanction is a voice too feeble in its operation to keep man to his duty. The physical sanction of

positive law cannot be dispensed with. Positive law does not, however, pretend to be co-extensive with ethics: nor is it desirable that it should be so. The undue extension beyond reasonable bounds of the physical sanction would be perhaps nearly as hurtful to the welfare of society as the entire absence of that sanction would be. A judicious union of the moral and the physical sanction is the system which experience shows to be the one best adapted for the welfare of social life, and is the one on which the whole fabric of modern society in all civilised countries is founded. The line of demarcation which separates ethics, properly so called, the subject of the moral sanction from those parts of the ethical system which have been embraced within its limits, and invested with a physical sanction by positive law, is often a fine one. Where it ought to be drawn is often the most perplexing subject which offers itself to the mind of the legislator. No clear or positive rules can be laid down on the subject, and the practice of civilised nations is not uniform. Instances in our own law, where the line of demarcation is most narrow, readily suggest themselves. To take an example from our law in civil matters, the false representation on which an action at law, or a suit in equity, can be founded, must be a false representation as to a fact, and not as to a promise. Slander too, and abusive language, are not, except in certain cases, visited by the sanction of positive law. The same rule holds good in criminal matters: the false pretence on which a person can be brought within the sanction of the criminal law must be as to a fact, and not as to a promise.

To follow out at any length the grounds on which the legislator proceeds in selecting from among the various classes of acts which are in breach of moral obligation, some for the imposition of the physical sanctions of positive law, while others, hardly, if at all, dissimilar to the former in character, are left to the operation of the moral sanction, would be foreign to the present purpose. That the question does not hinge upon