LAW OF PROPERTY BILL. [H.L.] (Hansard, 22 June 1922)

§ THE LORD CHANCELLOR

My Lords, in moving that the Commons Amendments to this Bill be now considered I may perhaps adopt a course that will be convenient to your Lordships if I make a very short general statement as to what has happened to this immense measure since it left your Lordships' House. The statement will be a very brief one. The measure passed through Committee stage in the House of Commons, and a Committee was appointed by both Houses, and the Bill was referred to that Committee, which made an expert examination of the terms of the Bill, an examination which resulted in many valuable Amendments that were ultimately adopted by the House of Commons on the Report stage. In regard to some of those Amendments I may say that I preferred the form of the Bill in which it left this 1100 House, but, speaking generally, the Amendments are improvements in the Bill, and the Bill is a better Bill in my judgment than it was when it left your Lordships' House. I shall, therefore, speak to any point which any individual member of this House may propose to take, on the next Motion from the Woolsack, That the Commons Amendments be agreed to en bloc.

I cannot let this occasion pass on which so great a revolution has been effected in the real property system of this country without expressing my gratitude to this House as a whole, and to many individuals in it especially, for the assistance which they have given me in undertaking this gigantic task. It is the literal truth that this Bill could never have hoped to become law had it been dependent for its chance upon Parliamentary progress being made in another place. If they could have found the patience, which I greatly doubt, to undertake the examination which your Lordships in three successive sessions of Parliament undertook, they certainly could not have found the time to do so. I myself owe snore than I can say to noble Lords in all parts of the House, who felt many times that they could not agree with some of the provisions of this Bill, but nevertheless co-operated wholeheartedly and successfully with me in the attempt to make it a better Bill.

In particular, expressions of gratitude are due to my noble and learned friends, Lord Haldane and Lord Buckmaster, without whose special and constant assistance the Bill would never have become law. All through the hot summer months of the year, in which our climate was exceptionally unfavourable to Committee work, these two noble and learned Lords devoted their leisure and their great learning to the task of improving the details of this measure in Committee, and without the contribution which they have made, with the more special knowledge of a great deal of the subject-matter than I can claim to possess, this immense reform in our law could never have been effected. I am also in debt to many other noble and learned Lords who would not wish that I should take up the time of your Lordships in mentioning them individually.

I for one have no doubt that this measure will be looked upon for many generations as a great charter in the development of the legal history of this matter. I cannot 1101 hope, and I do not hope, that we have avoided errors. I cannot hope, and I do not hope, that amending legislation will not be found to be necessary, and some of it even before the period in which this Bill is to become operative. But when all these deductions and allowances are made, I am quite certain that we have swept away much that is embarrassing and effected a simplification and cheapening of the whole system of land transfer the like of which was hardly conceived of by the best reforming brains in this country until the days of Cairns and Selborne, and Halsbury and Haldane.

It is exactly thirty-four years ago that a young man, addressing himself for the first time to the study of real property of this country, took out with him on a little walk to assist him in that purpose the work of the late Mr. Joshua Williams on Real Property. I was that young man, and I conceived myself at that date as being far more intelligent than I do at this moment. I addressed myself to that study; I spent many hours upon that book on the first day, and I ended my day's labour with the Statute of Uses. On my way home, as I carried that book, I surveyed that Statute of Uses from every conceivable point of view. I examined it in the concrete; I examined it in the abstract; and I came to the conclusion—I claim some merit for perspicuity in this matter—that it was the barbarous, if necessary, invention of a number of scholastic legal pedants, hut that it had no contact of any kind with our modern life, and I formed the resolution that if I ever attained any high place in the legal hierarchy that I would put an end to the Statute of Uses. Your Lordships will understand the emotion which fills me at this happy moment.

May I add this. I am told that there is one most respected practitioner, grown grey in the practice of the Chancery Law, sixty years of whose successful and brilliant life has been spent in the exposition, not unlucrative exposition, of the Statute of Uses, who, when he heard, not from my lips but from lips perhaps less sympathetic, that at last the Statute of Uses was abolished, definitely and irrevocably announced his intention not to survive it, and that he resigned his practice at once.