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Untitled Article
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Untitled Article
for this dereliction of one of the first duties and strongest interests of honest men . The worst of these motives is , a desire for the power of making fraudulent sales , and fraudulent mortgages : the best is , the pitiable weakness of ryat liking that other people should know the extent of their ineumbrances . Most fortunate would it have been for
hundreds of families now inextricably involved , if they had not been able to conceal the early stages of their embarrassments . It was the puerile desire to go on deceiving their neighbours , and keeping up the appearance of an income they no longer possessed , which prevented them from retrenching when retrenchment would have come in . time to save them ; and which has brought the whole class into a state , in which their champion , Sir James Graham , avers that the subtraction of twenty per cent , from their incomes , would be their absolute ruin .
On the part of the provincial attornies , who thrive by the litigation caused by defective titles to land , and who derive all their consequence from the management , whjch they now hold in their hands , of the pecuniary affairs of the whole landed aristocracy , the motives to oppose the publicity as well as the simplification of titles , are more obvious , and we have no doubt , far more consciously dishonest . The attorney , who under good laws and a good system of judicature would be nobody , is now the
most influential personage in every small place : and the landowner , whose secrets he knows , and whose affairs ( of which the landowner himself is tremblingly ignorant ) he alone is competent to manage , is held byliim in a state of the most slavish dependence . As the soul of the licentiate Pedrillo was interred with his money bags , that of an English landowner , intellect , conscience , and all , is folded up in his title deeds , and kept in a box at his attorne y ' a office . He dares not call his soul h ia own , for he dares not call his estate his own , without the leave of his attorney .
It is by the influence of this pernicious class , the only one , perhaps , whose interest as a class is radically irreconcilable with the public good , ( being indissolubly linked , not with the perfection but with the imperfection of all the institutions for the protection of property)—it is by this class that all the well-intended measures of the present ministry , for straightening the crookednesses of the law , and bringing justice home to the people ' s doors , are , and will continue to be , thwarted . In the particular instance before us , their baneful spell has enslaved the mind of the minister to whom we owe the Reform Bill . It is well understood that
Sir John Campbell , when he became connected with the ministry , yielded to a higher authority in giving up the Registration Bill , while he retained and carried through all the other law reforms which he had originated as the organ of the Real Property Commission . Earl Grey is understood to be a fanatioal opponent of Registration ; as well as a fanatical adherent of the Corn Laws and of the Usury Laws .
We cannot leave the subject of Registration , without giving due honour to the * Times' for the service which it has rendered to that important principle by its powerful advocacy . That advocacy , it would be injustice not to admit , is , on almost all questions of immediate interest , usually given to the cause of rational improvement ; and when given * never without rendering a service to that cause , such as no other of the periodical commentators on public affairs have -it in their power to render . The hostility of the Times / to the Poor Law Bill , is an-exception to its usual eotindoeos of practioijndgmen * , and will be found , we doubt not , aa in-
Untitled Article
440 Notes on the Newspapers .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 440, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/58/
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