of effecting a sale of land in England, and of creating a mortgage, was in ordinary circumstances thus proportioned to the value of the subject:-- Value of Expense of Expense of Estate. a Sale. a Mortgage. £50 30 per cent 30 per cent 100 15 ... 20 ... 600 7-1/2 ... 9 ... 1500 5 ... 3 ... 100,000 4 ... 12 ... Who would ever dream of applying his savings in the purchase of a piece of land of £50 value, when he must pay £30 more to make a title to it? The new scale of stamp duties alters the proportion; but the expense of legal writings, which forms the larger half of the charges above stated, remains undiminished, and operates as an absolute prohibition of the sale and purchase of land for investment under £1000 value. Such are the intricacies of the system, and such the want of a proper registry,[33] that we are told by the highest authorities that there is scarcely a title to be met with on which a purchaser can be quite secure, and which does not afford room for dispute and litigation. Now, contrast all this with the way in which the transfer of property is effected abroad. We have before us a copy[34] of an actual conveyance of a parcel of land in the Duchy of Nassau, the price of which was £181. The form of the contract extends to only four lines, and contains a reference to an appended schedule, which specifies briefly in separate columns the description of the subject, its extent, and its number on the register. The expense of the whole transaction, including government charges, was £4, 7s. The sale of a similar estate in England would, until the other day, have been attended with an expense of about £24. But we cannot enter into the specific means by which the exchange of land properties, especially those of small amount, may yet be facilitated; our object being merely to show how desirable, and how strictly coincident with the soundest conservative policy, it is to remove all discouragements to the natural employment of capital on the soil of the country. This leads us to the mention of one of those topics of Mr Laing's _Observations_, in which his opinions seem to be more ingenious than correct; we allude to the apparently paradoxical view he takes of the ultimate consequences of abolishing agricultural protection.