Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 4.djvu/289

LAND TRANSFER REFORM, 273 tifyinge vnto the recorder or secritary for the Generall Courte ; and that clause in the close of the printed law, title Conueyances Fradulent, page 14, requireinge the same, is hereby repealed." ^ These extracts from the Colony Records show the gradual devel- opment in this Commonwealth of the plan of recording convey- ances of land, and the County system so established is in operation to this day. For the first two centuries the records increased but slowly, and it answered fairly well, but since then the growth has been enormous. For instance, in the County of Suffolk, nineteen books sufficed for all deeds and other instruments left for record prior to A.' D. 1700. On the first of January, A. D. 1800, the number had risen to only 193. At the end of the year 1890 there were in the Registry of Deeds more than ten times that number of books, — i. e. 1,974, — huge folio MS. volumes containing, most of them, 640 pages each. These are the statistics for a single county. In the three counties of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Middlesex there are more than 4,500 volumes, while in all the counties together the aggregate is more than 10,000 volumes, and to this great number additions are continually being made. Nearly 24,000 deeds and other instruments were left for record in the County of Suffolk alone during the past year. These figures are certainly appalling, and we may well pause to ask where will this end, and what will be the condition of affairs a generation hence, if this rate of increase holds. Yet everything tends to show that even this rate will be far surpassed in the near future. The extraordinary growth of the country in wealth and population has already rendered necessary some other method of land transfer. It is evident that the present system, cumbersome and unwieldy at best, is fairly breaking down of its own weight. In fact, the whole system is defective, and is open to many obvious objections. It necessitates long and exhaustive searches of a mass of records which are continually becoming more and more enor- mous, the tedious preparation of abstracts, disputes over titles, difficulties, delays, expense, examinations and re-examinations without end. Speaking of this system of registration of deeds, Lord Cairns pronounced "" the objections to a register of deeds to be so manifest that hardly any person in the present day would venture to propose it. It would not simplify title in the least. It only puts on a formal record the whole of that multitude of deeds 1 Mass. Col. Rec, III., 203 ; IV. (pt. i), 22.