The Express.
London, England, 1858-10-08 00:00:00

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LONDON. IMIDAT, OCT. 8.

SPORTIN 0 INTMLIORNCR.

♦ SPECIAL EDITION of the " EXPRESS,"
containing the rot tilts of the day's Resin is pub-
lished ',pry eseni, ig during the Sporting Season, .t
viz o'eleek.

Tin last Ben mi of the Encumbered Estates Cart
is rapidly &mil( to a close. On the lit November
hest its place in the Judicial system will be taken
by the Leaded Estates Court—a tribunal whose
reaction itaill be to net in the proprietors of all
estates, whether eacumbered or not, those (militia
of transfer which the Court now about to expire con-
ferred on the owoess of property which was at once
too strictly tied up in the fetters of entail to
be the sa►ject of conveyance, and too hopelessly bir-
dseed with debt to be of any benefit to its
owner, err any utdity to the public. English Lew re-
formerewill watch with great interest the operations
of the new tribunal. Its establishment is the most
vigorous and comprehensive measure of improvement
yet attempted is the antiquated system of our real
property law. It doss not, indeed, quite carry out the
views advocated by those whose aim it is to render
the transfer of land as simple, as rapid, and u inex-
pensive as the treader of stock. But in many
respects it makes a near approach to this
eminently deeleible end; nor is it possible to
axone that when the beneficial results of its
operation shall have been witnessed in Ireland, the
landholders on this side of St. George's Cbmaael
will long coesest to forego the great advents/pm
which it holds lerth, in securing at a very medente
cost the advantage of • parliamentary title, a cheap
treader, ands ready market.
It is not dna that the directly beneficial effects
of legislation are so signally and so rapidly
manifested is they have been in the ease
of the Encumbered Estates Court. When
the Act establishing that tribunal first came
into operation, the miseries of Ireland, sufficiently
deplorable from the action of other canoes, were fear-
tally aggravated by the laws regulating the tenure
and transfer of real property. The gripe of feudal-
ism was heavy ea the land. The spendthrift owner
whose whole nasal means were swallowed up is
judgments sod mortgage, was unable to shake him-
self loose fram the clinging burden of a ruinous pro-
perty. The &meow Aecredstee was fast riveted
rend hie neck by the parchment bonds of settle-
ments and entails ; where the mountain of debt had
aceamelated to a hopeless height, the Court of Chan-
cery stepped in, not to sever the unnatural link that
emulated a rained owner to a ruined estate, but to
take every shilling of the proeseds of that estate by
the hands of a receiver, and hand them over for
dietributirm among the creditors, still retaining the
inheritanee as • heir-loom of degradation and in-
solently for the beggared issue of the beggared pro-
prietor. Under these gloomy circumstances setting
of coins was ever spent on the estate : there was
se capital, there were no improvements : every-
thing was waste and desolation, from the eon-
acre peasantry who starved in rage sad
wretehednem over the surface of the half cultivated
soil. to the seedy absentee who skulked through life
under the bards. of his democrats ownership among
the purlieus of Soho or the eatuninets of theQuertur
Latin. Fertnately in those days we had a states-
man among as--a leader who had the eye to me
what wee to Ds done and the will to do it. To make
Irish land marketable—to divorce the bankrupt
owner from the mortgaged soil—to strike off the
feudal bondage under which the whole social system
groaned—this wee the thing to do, and this thing
Sir Roam. Pm. did. The Legislative machinery
by which he effected his papas was the Balsam-
bend Estates Act—the Act which, having done its
prescribed work, is now about to give plan to an-
other law, destined to apply the same principles to a
wider field of operations.

How well the expiring law has accomplished its
purpose—how thoroughly it has moceedad in its
main object of bringing a flood of new capital upon
the land of Ireland—of transferring Irish estates
from the moneyless to the monied--of taking
that great means of wealth and happiness,
the soil, oat of the feeble hands that could
makvnothing of it, and placing it in the strong
hands under whose management it has become a
living source of national affluence and national pros-
perity—how all these wise and beneficent ends have
been wrought oat by the agency of the Encumbered
Estates Act, is abundantly shown by the ninth and
concluding Report of its operations, recently issued
by Mr. 011ISIPT. From this document it appears
that in the coarse of the nine years (from
1849 to 1868) during which the Court
has been in existence, the total amount of
purchase-money received by the Commissions=
Lae exceeded 23,160,0001. To the extent of this
enoraions sum the land of Ireland has been relieved
from the destructive blight of ever-growing debt,
insolvent proprietors, and undeveloped resources-
It is one of the most gratifying circumstances cou-
nted with this great and beneficent change that
if has been principally accomplished by the efforts
and the resources of Irishmen themselves. It is
Irish industry and Irish enterprise that has been the
main instrument in this noble work of Irish reggae-
ration. of the 23,160,0001. of parchase-money, very
little more th an 3,160,0001. has been paid by English,
Scotch, and foreign capitalists. All the residue,

s
which may be taken in round umbels at 20,000,1
is the capital of Irishmen. the number of

perchmen; is 8,238, that of all other nations 324.
Nothing can be more satisfactory than such statistics
as these. It is impossible to conceive a stronger or
'mere gratifying proof of the vast good that may be
amonspliehed by that which to shallow observers
appears to be a mere measure of legal reform, but is
in reality the working out of a great social change.
Those who have studied with any degree of intel-
ligent attention the evolutions of history, or the
existing state of the civilised world, must be deeply
convinced of the vast influence exercised upon the
welfare of nations and the status of the individual
citizen by the laws regulating the tenure, the trans-
mission, and the divisibility of land. To those who
may still be sceptical on the point we would simply
my, Compare the social state of Ireland in 1868 with
the social mate of Ireland in 1849 ; try to gain
something like an adequate conception of the
real meaning of the fact that in the course of
those nine years upwards of 20,000,0001. of capital
has bee, freely invested in land ; compare the land
as owned and cultivated now with the land as
owned and cultivated then ; and after having gone
threagh this proems candidly and carefully, deny if you
can that a relbrm in the laws affecting property in
land has in this instance, at all events, proved to be
of the highest moment in its beans% upon the
wealth, the happiness, and the social progress of a
nation. Let this consideration be borne in
mind when the time arrives for further
discussion on the improvement and simplification
of oar English system of land transfer. It
is time that our legislators should be convinced
that a question like this is no mere measure of Legal
Reform, to be fought out by the Law Amendment
Society on the one side and the country solicitors on
the other. It is a great and momentous change,
deeply affecting the productiveness of the soil, the
welfare of the landowners, and the prosperity of the
State.

MIIIIIIIINER