surrender to and warrant from the Commonwealth, as the only legal evidence of title, no preliminary contract can be made; no inchoate title can vest, pending the preparation of abstracts, procurement of outstanding interests, or the obtaining of a charter for a corporation, intended as the grantee. But once the bargain made, the parties must leave it in parol, until these several things are obtained, or the vendor must surrender to the Commonwealth and it must forthwith grant the warrant, and the vendee pay the price and run the risk of defective titles.

We submit that the enforcement of such law would not facilitate, but rather hinder, the transfer of titles to lands; and seriously interfere with that individual dominion over property which is one of our boasted absolute rights. We assume the Act is made to apply to counties containing more than four hundred thousand inhabitants, so as to meet any objections that might otherwise be presented by the country counties with less population. The draughtsman of this Bill must have been apprehensive that it would not be beneficial in its operation, were it applied generally throughout the Commonwealth, and hence it would become law in but two counties of the State.

There are subject matters of legislation that, by their terms, are made applicable to certain counties only. Conditions existing in those counties make, the laws peculiarly applicable therein. No question of principle, nor sole, absolute and despotic dominion over property which one man may exercise in total exclusion of the right of any other, is involved in such special legislation.

Not so with this proposed Act, however.

The law of the ownership of lands is allodial in one county, but not in the adjoining county. A man may own a farm in Allegheny County and he transfers the title by surrender to the Commonwealth with a petition that it convey to the purchaser by means of warrant. He may own another farm in an adjoining county and he transfers the

title by deed in fee simple direct to the purchaser. He may own a farm, portion of which lies in each county, and when he comes to convey, he must proceed in the Orphans' Court of Allegheny County for the transfer of that portion located therein by surrender and petition for warrant, and by deed as to that portion situate in the adjoining county.

A case directly in point came under the writer's observation a short time since, when a large and valuable tract of land situate in both Allegheny and Westmoreland Counties was purchased by a land improvement and industrial company. Works are being built on part of the tract and a town on the balance. A thousand or more lots have been plotted.

The land company can convey lots in Westmoreland County by deed in fee as heretofore. But in Allegheny County, it must do so by surrender of title to the Commonwealth and new warrant from the Commonwealth to the grantee. Titles are different. The dominion over and right of property in the lots are different; and if the county line runs through a lot we submit that the character of title and method of transfer thereof, will be sufficiently complicated to engage the attention of the Examiners of Title of that branch of the Orphans' Court to be known as the Division for Land Titles and Liens.

And yet this Act of sixty-six sections is intended "to simplify and expedite the sale and transfer of land."

The proposed Act to provide for the registration, by the County Surveyor, of all transfers of real estate or interest therein is not entirely untried legislation in some portions of our Commonwealth. It seems that law somewhat similar to that contained in the proposed Act, has heretofore been in force in some of our large cities, and the framer of the Bill, now discussed, argues, because it has operated beneficially in those localities, it will be beneficial throughout the State.

It cannot be denied that the very nature of things in the large cities is the great reason for the difference of statutory

laws in them, from the laws governing the conduct of affairs in smaller municipalities and rural districts. The government of large cities must have laws peculiarly apt to the conditions existing there. Those same laws would be inappropriate if we were to attempt to apply them in country districts.

If the law for the registration of titles has been found beneficial, we contend it is because it was peculiarly applicable to the localities to which it was limited.

Surveys and plans of territory within city limits, could be easily made and kept. Once a plot were sub-divided, each lot is thereafter known and designated either by letter or number; and it is but rarely, in the history of the conveyancing of lots, that the identity or original lines of any is lost or changed; hence it may be easy to keep track of a lot of ground after it has taken its place on the records of the County Surveyor. Conveyancing of this character is the rule in the cities. New sub-divisions or the combining of several lots in one parcel are exceptional.

The practice in the country, however, is entirely different. It is both rare and exceptional to find a piece of property there, preserve its identity and original lines through three successive transfers. We usually find a deed contains parts of several different surveys. A prosperous farmer will buy small additions to his lands as opportunity offers; then destroy every physical evidence of separate purchases, and finally devise or convey his entire estate to his children, and establish new and arbitrary division lines, regardless of the original surveys.

A land owner may sell his farm to an improvement company, and they will attach it to several other tracts, take off part upon which an industrial plant is built, and lay out hundreds of town lots on the remaining ground, obliterating all former property lines. What is a farm to-day may be streets, alleys and town-lots to-morrow. In time of excitement, upon the laying out of new towns, the title to lots has

been known to pass to several different purchasers in a single day.

Again a coal company may own the coal underlying several separate tracts of land and the surface of a portion of these tracts. Another company may own the coal underlying adjoining properties and certain of the surface. Then there may be an exchange of portions of both coal and surface so that it would be practically impossible to preserve the identity of the different properties and interests therein.

Within the past two months we were concerned in the exchange of twenty-five different pieces of coal and six or eight pieces of surface, among five different coal companies, containing from one one-hundredth of an acre up to two hundred acres, and taken out of perhaps as many different surveys, all for the purpose of straightening lines and facilitating mining operations.

It is hard to understand how a successful and intelligent registration of title could be made under such conditions.

While it may be true that reform, in different lines of human conduct, is desired, yet we fear that statute made law is too generally looked upon as the panacea for all the ills in our social fabric.

Legislation is needed when new conditions in trade arise, but surely not when the admitted purpose is to undo a system, relating to the ownership of property, which is the development of ages; one of the agencies in the formation of individual character and an important part of our constitutional life.

The tendency of the day is toward the obliteration of individual life, and the sinking of personal character in the combined thought and action of the entire community. It is a tendency that we should view with great concern. As an economic system which rests upon the total or partial abolition of the right of private property, attended with the danger of actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the State, may be taken as but the fore

runner of communism, and a system which will be destructive of individual life and personal character.

We therefore submit that both these Acts would be cumbersome and hurtful. They would interfere with that free and convenient transfer of title, which is so valuable an adjunct to the successful dispatch of business, and forever destroy that long cherished attachment to the principle of individual dominion over property.

REPLY TO MR. GAITHER'S PAPER

In the paper just read, the system for recording of titles as provided by the drafts for Acts of Assembly is said to be hurtful as tending to destroy the individual absolute ownership of landed property. It is feared that the operation of the Acts will be cumbersome and inconvenient, particularly in the less thickly settled portions of the State. It is suggested that the system does not provide protection for equitable interests created by agreement of sale, and that it is not sufficiently facile to cover the conveyances and holding of mining rights and easements. It is also said to be a scheme open to the objection of being neither allodial nor feudal.

If the Acts proposed, and the system of transfer embodied in them, are cumbersome and hurtful, they should not be adopted; and this Association should oppose their adoption. But statement is not proof, and objections should be considered before being sustained.

As to the objection that the individual rights of ownership are attacked: Read any proper brief of title to land: it will be observed at once that the origin of every good title is a grant from the Commonwealth. The only effect of the proposed law is to shorten the brief, so that instead of holding under a number of intermediate transfers, any one, or all of which may be illegal or insufficient, each holder of land will hold directly from the fountain head of all titles and the dangers of illegal intermediate acts and omissions will be