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several States, at an early date, adopted the system of recording instruments affecting real property, and provided that subsequently executed instruments, conveying interests in lands to purchasers for value, in good faith, and without notice, to them, of the existence of any prior, unrecorded, conveyance, will have precedence of the prior, unrecorded, conveyance. This enables a purchaser of land, generally, to learn by a search in one or two offices whether his title is valid. Judgments of the federal courts become liens, within the district of their jurisdiction, without record in any State office. The facts of heirship, deaths, and marriages must also be traced outside the record. These provisions were a vast improvement on the English system, which lacked the provision making conveyances, in good faith, valid in the order of priority of record. Hence, in England, search was necessary in every place where an instrument affecting title might happen to be. In some cases, of property of considerable value, the legal charges, for making the transfer and becoming satisfied of the validity of the title, exceeded the whole purchase money paid for the land. Since the system of registration of deeds was perfected in America a still more perfect system, known as the Registration of Titles, has grown up and is practiced in all the colonies of Australasia, and, it is said, in several smaller states of Europe. This consists in vesting the recording officer with power to make the title perfect in the grantee by simply rccording the conveyance to him, as the title to a note is good, in the hands of a bona fide endorsee for value, even though there may have been a fraud or theft in the previous course of transfer. Such a system makes land as negotiable as commercial paper.

The Register is required to use care in recording the instrument, both in searching the previous conveyances to accertain in whom the present title is, and in properly identifying any new grantor as being the same person as the last grantee. An insurance fund is also provided, by requiring that a small fraction of one per cent. on the value of the land, should be paid as a transfer and recording fee, and out of the fees thus received a reserve is held for the purpose of indemnifying any owner who may lose his title by this system. Very few losses, in all not exceeding £8,000, have been paid out of this fund, which now amounts to about £158,000, and in three of the oldest colonies, viz., New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania, the fund is still intact.

The United States have not thus far limited the quantity of

land a single purchaser could monopolize, nor prohibited the free purchase of lands by citizens of foreign countries. Such, however, is the objection felt in many quarters to the extensive purchase of lands by foreign capitalists, which have, in a few instances, been made, that legislation to prevent it in future is probable.

During the reign of George II., the British Parliament provided that the writ of execution for debt, to be issued in the Colonial Courts of America, should call for the sale of the lands and tenements of the debtor as well as his goods. In Great Britain, a land-holding debtor might be dissolute, insolvent, and bankrupt, but no creditor could, or can to-day, obtain any writ of execution which will sell the debtor's land. Hence, there, "once a landlord always a landlord." If he bets away his fortune at the races, the return of his quarterly rent days will soon restore the means to bet again. In America, however, the largest landed estate is dissipated by the first spendthrift who comes into its possession, provided he become a bankrupt.

In England, also, the law of primogeniture (preference for the oldest son) required the estate to descend to the eldest son only, unless it was otherwise disposed of by will. The law of entail also permitted the land to be so given by deed or will that only a life estate should at any time inhere in its present owner, the inheritable fee being at all times in the heirs in perpetuity. These two laws tended still further to tie up the trade in land in England. In America, in all the colonies, or as soon as they became States, it was provided that all land should descend at death equally to all children, and wills or deeds which tied up the title by entail, so as to render them untransferable for more than the lives of one, two, or three persons were made void. Throughout America, also, State, county, town, and school taxes rest directly on land, as a rule. If not paid, the title to the land is sold for the tax. In this respect the so-called land tax in England, which is only in law a tax on the occupant, though called a land tax, does not resemble the American taxes on land. In default of payment of the English land tax the writ for their collection is powerless to sell the land. It authorizes only a distraint on the goods and chattels of the occupant. It is a tax on occupation, not on ownership.

In America, land is everywhere saleable for both taxes and debts.

Bounty laws were, from time to time, passed, donating certain

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quantities of land, usually 160 acres or 80 acres, to persons who had served as soldiers or sailors in either of the wars of 1776-'83, of 1812-'15, of 1847 to 1848 with Mexico, or of 1861-25 with the seceding States. Public lands were also donated to aid in the construction of canals, and section No. 16 in every township was donated to the support of schools.

By an Act of Congress, also, lands proportionate in quantity to the representation each State had in Congress were donated to it for the endowment of an agricultural college.

By all these causes, land was forced upon the market in quantities so that each man could get his 40, 80, 160 acres, half section or section of land at near the government price, $1.25 an acre, until the influx of settlers" gave it a higher value. The first settlers, so far from fearing "monopolists," were glad to have either resident or non-resident capitalists buy in their neighborhood, as it tended to raise the value of the land, and gave them a class of taxpayers on whom they could freely levy for cost of schools, court-houses, bridges, roads, and local improvements. In some of the Western and newer States, local taxation, in the hands of resident voters, tended to throw as much of the burden of taxes as possible on non-resident owners of lands. The profits of land-owning were thus kept down to the minimum, and the inducement to monopolize land was small. It hardly became matter of complaint until about the year 1870.

57. Effect of Free Land on Immigration.-Freedom of individual conduct and belief, equality in political rights, and abundant supplies of cheap land, supplied the chief inducements to immigration from Europe down to 1851. Since then the gold and silver mines, the rapid progress of railroad building, and the growth of manufactures, under the stimulus supplied by an abundant currency and a partial protection of American producers against the importation of competing goods, have largely increased the inducements to immigration previously existing.* The rate of increase has been so evenly from 33 to 35 per cent. in each decade that, as early as 1830 statisticians began to compute accurately the future rate of increase of the Republic. Dr. Carey, in 1835, placed the population in 1880 at 60,000,000, which has been verified. Similar estimates show a population in 1930 of 191,000,000. This future rate of increase

* Since 1790, when the first census was taken, the following table shows the increase in every ten years:

of American population, if no great wars intervene, is one of the most demonstrable theorems in social science.

Since 1819 a careful register of immigration has been kept, the result of which appears in the table contained in the note.

By comparison of this table of immigration with the facts set forth in the chapter on "Commercial Crises," it will be seen that the movement of population into the country, while somewhat affected by the Irish famine in 1846-9, was most rapid in the years

Of the total population in 1790, 17.8 per cent. were slaves. In 1860, 12.6 per cent. were slaves.

* Including Indians and Alaska.

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of money inflation, and of great activity of the societary movement, whether induced by protection, war, or increased production of gold and silver. While the magnitude of the immigration maintains a general increase in subsequent years over earlier, it more than doubles between 1826 and 1828, a period of protection; doubles again in 1832-over 1831-drops slightly in 1833 on the passage of the Compromise Tariff; rises slightly in 1834, but drops sharply in 1835; attains a great height in 1836 and '37, and again in 1842, but drops one-half in 1843; resumes its upward course in 1846; is heaviest in the periods of the Irish famine (1846-9), the revolutions in Europe, 1848, and the California gold supply, 1849 to 1854; but in 1854, in the midst of this gold supply, it drops one-half, thereby showing that the condition of industries in the United States was then very bad. In fact, from the winter of 1853-4 to the bank crisis of 1857 the manufacturing industries in the United States had been in a low, typhoid condition, owing to the causes named in our chapter on "Crises." From the highwater mark of 1854 the immigration declined, under the policy of the almost free importation of foreign goods, from 427,833 in 1854 to little more than a fourth that number in 1858-9. It sank still lower in the first two years of the war, but in the second two years it nearly resumed its former rate, but did not pass the rate of 1854 again until 1872 and 1873, which were years of marked activity in railroad building. The following static chart shows the rate for each year on a scale of 40,000 population to the section line: