d

fession raised to this important proposition? The experience of other nations has pronounced in its favour. The opinions of wise laymen, founded upon reason, and confirmed by that experience, are ranged on its side. Sir William Petty, in reviewing the consequences which spring from the want of a Registry, has said, that though few may be actually damnified, yet 'all are hindered by fear, and deterred from dealing.'* Sir William Temple mentions the Registry introduced into Holland and Flanders by the Emperor Charles V. as one cause of the commercial prosperity of the Dutch, by making all purchases safe.† Sir Joshua Child ascribes the low rate of interest in Holland to 'the ascertaining real securities by their public Registries;' the want of which, he says, and not the want of money, makes borrowing difficult in England. Even the high authority of the great lawyers of former days whom we have cited-nothing loth to praise existing institutions of their own country, nor prone to prefer those of others, nor at all affecting change-are arrayed on the same side. What, then, say their successors of the present day? Again the weight of authority is with us. We have on our side the great philosophic lawyer of the age, the father of law reform. But not he-not Mr Bentham alone-the Commissioners, whether of the common law or the equity bar, or those who devote themselves to the practice of conveyancing, are all of one mind; and Mr Bell and Mr Butler, themselves a host, agree. Comforted and assured by such protection, we may adventure to meet the opponents of the measure, freely confessing both their high authority in the profession, and their capacity to do the antagonist argument ample justice. Sir E. Sugden, Mr Preston, and Mr Coote, have declared their hostility; and from their large experience as conveyancers, their great general learning, and other powerful talents, we may be well assured, that no vestige of a reason can be found to bear against us which has escaped such adversaries as these. We have perused their arguments; we have given them all the attention they have so good a right to claim; and the result of the enquiry is, that we are far more dismayed by their high names than by their reasonings; and that even their authority and arguments together, appal us far less, and make us less uneasy about the issue of the conflict, than the official attributes wherewithal one of them is invested.

The only arguments worth considering, which these able and

*Political Arithmetic.

+ Observations on United Provinces, cap. i. Also, Popular Discon tents. Works, vol. i.

learned persons have advanced, may be reduced to these twoFirst, The danger or the hardship of making nullity, at least postponement, the penalty of neglect to register. Secondly, The inconvenience of giving publicity to the state of men's real encumbrances.

First, It is not, as we understand, proposed that unregistered deeds affecting land should be void, but only that they should be postponed to those which are registered; that a deed first registered should have the preference over one executed earlier, but registered late. This, no doubt, is, as it were, a relative forfeiture. But there is no other conceivable way of enforcing publicity, and securing bona fide purchasers, or encumbrancers, against latent rights. Nor is there any thing unjust in attaching this penalty to the neglect. The act necessary to avoid it is in each man's power; and his interest at the moment will always keep him awake to the performance of it. Such has been the result in Scotland. The penalty in question, so far from being peculiar to the proposed plan, is a part of almost every law made to regulate the transmission and transference of property of every description. When a stamp duty is imposed upon bills of exchange or promissory notes, whoever discounts one of these instruments without looking at the stamp, runs the risk of giving his money for a piece of waste paper. When the late act required all promises to be in writing, in order to take simple contracts out of the statute of limitations, any creditor who had neglected to obtain such a revival of the debt, relying on parole admissions, forfeited that debt; and here the new law was not only one of forfeiture, but was retrospective in its operation. When the statute of frauds required all contracts relating to land to be in writing, whoever bought an estate, and paid the price without a written memorandum, paid his money for nothing, and had to blame his own laches for being left remediless. When the same wholesome law gave parole leases for more than three years the effect only of leases at will, the tenant who laid out his money without a written lease or agreement, was at the mercy of his landlord, whom the act enabled to take advantage of the omission, and reap the benefit of the outlay. When the annuity act voided all annuities, of which a memorial was not enrolled, it enabled the borrower to avail himself of the lender's neglect, and subjected the latter to a forfeiture for his want of due care. In short, the instances are without end of the law compassing its purpose by means of forfeiture, or penalty in the nature of forfeiture; and there can be no possible reason why, in the case under consideration, we should reject a measure which tends to make all men secure,

because it may, peradventure once in ten thousand times, prove detrimental to some one through his own neglect-the more especially, when they whom it requires to perform the act are the parties immediately interested in it.

Secondly, The mischief of injuring credit, and especially commercial credit, by revealing encumbrances, appears greatly overrated. It may well be questioned, whether any good is gained by enabling a man in trade to obtain trust on the faith of ha ving an estate in land, when he has only the name of one, the substance belonging to his mortgagees. Scotland has been in the condition contemplated by the argument, ever since the year 1617; and Holland for nearly a century before that. No practical inconvenience has been found to result from publicity in either country. It appears strange, indeed, to hear the alarm of publicity sounded in England, where things of a much more delicate nature in private families are recorded, and accessible to all the world for the moderate sum of a shilling ;-we allude, of course, to the Registry of wills, which embraces, without any exception, every will relating to personal property, from the largest to the smallest in amount.

The other objections which have been urged, are either principally to the supposed details of the measure, founded indeed for the most part upon the experience of the very faulty Registry adopted in Middlesex and Yorkshire; or they are such as the very ingenious method proposed by the Commissioners in their Report, has a powerful tendency to remove. On the principles of that method, our limits prevent us from entering at present. But we cannot dismiss the subject without joining in the general applause which it has called forth; and we trust, that before we return to the consideration of the subject, it will have been matured by the learned author, M. Duval, and his colleagues, and have finally received the sanction of the legislature.*

Mr Bellenden Ker, whose tract has given occasion to these re

We have in this article only had occasion to mention incidentally the important labours of this Commission. But while we reserve for another occasion a statement of what they have done, we cannot suffer this opportunity to pass without expressing what we are aware is the general feeling of gratitude to them for their unwearied exertions. No remune ration, in the ordinary sense of the term,can be deemed an adequate compensation to men, like Mr Campbell, in the highest walks of forensic practice, who devote the whole of their scanty leisure, not to recreation or needful repose, but to a most difficult and toilsome enquiry. Their true reward must be the consciousness of the service they are rendering their country, and the confidence that they will be held in lasting remembrance among those who have improved her most valued institutions.

marks, is certainly entitled to the best thanks of all who desire to study this question. He has treated it in a manner which unites learning with perspicuity in an extraordinary degree. No person, be he ever so ignorant of law, can experience the least difficulty in following him throughout; and it would be hard to find a work upon a matter so purely professional, and of an aspect so forbidding, less deformed with pedantry, or less exposed to the charge of being either tedious or repulsive.

ART. VIII.-1. Report from, and Minutes of Evidence taken before, the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Coal Trade. Folio. London. 1829.

2. On the Coal Trade. Pp. 16. London. 1830.

FUEL occupies a very prominent place amongst the articles most indispensable to existence. In our northern climates, it is, in fact, quite as essential as food or clothes. Its cost forms a large item in the expense of every family-in that of the peasant, as well as of his lord. It also enters deeply into the price of most species of manufactures. Every one knows that the comparatively rapid advancement of Manchester, Birmingham, Glas gow, Leeds, &c., in manufacturing industry, is principally to be ascribed to the great abundance and cheapness of fuel at those places.

Timber is the great article of fuel in France, and most of the Continental states; but with us it is far too scarce and dear to be used as such to any considerable extent. Our deficiency in this respect is, however, of little importance, as we have the good fortune to possess an inexhaustible supply of the very best coal. But this invaluable mineral is not distributed equally over the whole country. The great coal-fields are mostly in the northern counties; and as coal is a very bulky and heavy article, its price is necessarily much enhanced in London and the southern parts of the island, to which it must be conveyed by a distant sea-voyage or by a lengthened inland navigation.

Considering the importance of coal as a necessary of life, and in the arts, one not acquainted with the actual state of the coal trade, would naturally conclude, not only that it would be exempted from every sort of tax or duty, but that every possible facility would be given to the conveyance of coal from the mines to the more distant parts. This is what one would be disposed to infer à priori; but we are sorry to say, that this is not the way in which the coal trade of England has been treated. Ge

nerally speaking, our commercial and financial system is founded on more enlarged and liberal principles than that of any other European country; but, in the particular instance of the coal trade, it can lay claim to no such distinction. On the contrary, this important department of industry is subjected to the most unjust and oppressive regulations. And the patience with which they have been submitted to, strikingly evinces the power of custom, in reconciling us to the most pernicious abuses.

Nothing but the pressure of the most overwhelming necessity could ever justify the imposition of a duty on so indispensable an article as coal. Surely, however, if such a tax is to be imposed, it ought to be made equally to affect all classes and districts. What would be thought of Parliament were it to enact that a heavy tax should be laid on all the bread consumed to the south of the Humber, from which all that was made use of to the north of that river should be exempted? Would not such a proceeding be a manifest violation of one of the first duties of Government, which is bound to extend the same protection to all who are under its authority, and to subject them all to the same equal burdens? But this obvious and universally recognised principle has been trampled under foot in the case of the coal duty. It is not made to affect the whole empire, but only particular portions of it. Had it been made to fall exclusively on the inhabitants of those districts where coal is produced, and where it is naturally cheapest, something, perhaps, might have been found to say in its favour; but such is not the case. The duty is imposed on water-borne coals only, or on those that are conveyed to great distances, and does not affect those that are consumed near the mines, or that may be conveyed by land. All the southern counties of England, as Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Middlesex, Kent, Surrey, &c., are destitute of coal-mines, and are obliged to import supplies of coal from the north by sea. And because such is the case, because the coal-fields happen to be in Northumberland, Durham, and Lancashire, Government interposes to increase the naturally high price of coal sent to the metropolis and the southern counties, by laying a duty on the sea-borne coal of no less than six shillings a-chaldron, being fully fifty per cent upon the price of coals as sold by the miners! Whether there be any tax so grossly unequal and oppressive in Turkey or Spain, we know not; but we believe we may safely affirm, that it has no parallel in any other European country. The nobility and gentry of the North may consume any quantity of coals that they please, without paying a single sixpence of duty. The owners of Alnwick and Raby Castles escape a tax that presses with grinding severity on the poorest