Other Rights of the feudal principle of the ultimate ownership of the King has produced little or no effect in giving to the state which the King personifies, rights over English land. The modern state has prac tically no mineral rights. The precious metals, gold and silver, which for commercial pur poses are practically not found in Great Bri tain, are in law crown property and can only be worked under license from the crown. But all other minerals belong to the tenant in fee simple of the soil who leases or works them for his own private benefit. The crown lands in England are small in extent; ownership by local authorities is still in its infancy. There is no prairie land to grant to railway pioneers or new settlers. When land is wanted for the purpose of some undertaking of a public nature — such as a railway, waterworks or the site of a post office—it has, as a rule, to be purchased by the company, or authority concerned, under statutory machinery, by which the fair value of the land has to be paid, plus 10 per cent com pensation for compulsory sale. In the year 1887 the principle of compulsory acquisition was, subject to many safeguards, extended to the acquisition by a local authority of land to be let in very small quantities, called allotments, to agricultural laborers or others for culti vation. The Irish Land Purchase Act of 1903 proceeded on the principle of a loan by the state to a tenant who wished to • purehase his holding from his landlord, and agreed with him as to the price. It did not directly involve either public ownership or compulsory ac quisition.
In recent years several attempts, culminating in the Land Transfer Act 1897, have been made to induce English landholders to abandon the present system of private trans fer of land for a system based on a Land Registry. Under the present system whenever land is sold or mortgaged, it is necessary for the purchaser or mortgagee to satisfy himself as to the title by going into all dealings with the land for a period which may be as long as 40 years. This is an expensive process, but it has been endeared by centuries of experience to English landholders -and -lawyers. - At the present time, a public Land Registry has been substituted for the old system only in London.
The principle of the new system is to enter the name of the proprietor of (or rather the per son entitled to sell) every piece of land on a register and to make land transferable by the person registered by means of a fresh entry on the registry, as if it were so much stock in the funds. The extension of this system to the rest of the country is a question of time; but in legal matters time moves slowly.
Trend of the Recent developments of the law have in nearly all cases tended to re strict the freedom of the individuals in relation to land. Neither in town nor country are land lord and tenant allowed to make what bargain they choose; it is assumed that the economic inferiority of the tenant places him at too great a disadvantage for it to be possible for him to make a contract fair to himself, and so beneficial to the community. Men are no longer allowed to settle their land in such a way as to make it unsalable, and the community has asserted the right to dispossess the individual, not only for definite works of a public nature, but in order to provide its poorer members with an interest in the land. It has also compelled land owners in the Metropolis to abandon the old system of private conveyance and mortgage for a system which is in a sense public, as it is worked by public officials, and which may thus be regarded as a kind of reversion to the old method of public transfer. The same sys tem will also in time form a new and more accurate 'Domesday Book'— a purpose which the provision for a complete valuation of all the land in the kingdom as at 30 April 1909, under the Finance Act of 1909-10, was designed to effect. Finally, modern legislation has put an end to the former advantage of land in respect of taxation and so claimed a larger share in real property directly for the state. The simplification Of the land laws may be said to be one aspect of this change; intricacy and subtlety of phrase and interpretation may be tolerated by a private owner as the price of the liberty of complicated dispositions and of secrecy, but these niceties are inconsistent with the uniformity which must accompany public control.