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changer refused to give a Mussulman a hundred suls. The report was sent, and it was communisilver piasters in exchange for a hundred-piaster note, which was then current for forty piasters. The holder of the note gathered a mob in the bazaar, which plundered the money-changer's whole stock-in-trade. No notice was taken of the complaint the Jewish victim lodged at the police office, whither a considerable share of the spoil had found its way. There have even been instances of housebreaking in which some of the robbers were seen in the uniform of the constabulary.

Again, on one occasion, the Turkish chief of a police station was making his nightly rounds, accompanied by a strong force, when he was met by a gang of thieves going about to find some opportunity of robbing people passing through the streets on their way home after spending the evening, as is the practice, at friends' houses. They called to him to put out his lantern, and he did so. That police officer was in nominal receipt of a salary of about one hundred pounds a year, he had no private resources whatever, and yet, after fourteen years' service, he retired with a fortune of nearly twenty thousand pounds. The fact speaks for itself.

A murder was committed, and, on hearing of it, the authorities sent another officer of police to find out the names of the assassins. This was easily done, as there were many witnesses of the crime, which was perpetrated by daylight in an open street; and the officer repaired to the house of three brothers, who had been seen killing the murdered man. He remained closeted with them for nearly an hour, and then took them to the gate of the town, where he told them to make their way to some village. One of them was afterward captured by the friends of the victim, and taken to the police office. A written accusation had been presented, and was produced; but the names inscribed in it had been altered by the chief of the police, and the prisoner was released on the plea that his name was not mentioned in it. Several cases of burglary had occurred, and one of them was falsely laid at the door of a personal enemy of the informant. An officer and two constables were sent to the house of the man accused, and they arrested him. On his declaring that he had no knowledge of the burglary, he was stripped and put to the torture with red-hot irons to make him confess. He laid a complaint before the governor-general of the province, who had him carried to the military hospital to be cured of his wounds, and had the officer and constables placed under arrest. When conversing with the English consul, the governor-general requested him to report the case to his embassy, because he had heard of his conduct having been misrepresented by other con

cated by the English embassy to the Sultan's Government, which blamed the governor-general for not having summarily dismissed the officer and constables from the public service. The provincial council was at once convoked, and a solemn and formal declaration was signed by the governor-general, as president of it, and by all the councilors, to the effect that no incident of the kind had ever occurred, and that the English consul's statement was the mere offspring of his imagination. This declaration was forwarded to the Porte, and by the Porte to the embassy, where no further notice was taken of the case; and the consul heard of it only a year afterward, from the clerk who wrote the declaration under the governor-general's dictation. The officer and constables were of course ordered to return to their duty.

In a neighboring provincial town, where there is no British consul, a circumstance of a somewhat similar nature took place at about the same time. The chief of the police, with half a dozen constables, entered the workshop of a Christian blacksmith, and told him that he must move immediately to another street where there was a vacant workshop belonging to the Government, for which he must pay rent in advance. The blacksmith replied quite respectfully that he had paid rent in advance for the one he occupied, which he would lose by moving to another, and that he would lose also many of his customers by the change; but he was peremptorily ordered to go. He complained of this treatment to his bishop, who went to intercede for him with the governor - general. Before the case was decided either way, the chief of the police returned with his followers, and they commenced beating him with sticks until he was hardly able to reach his house. Two days later he died of the injuries he had received. An English medical man, who was there at the time, being much shocked by what had happened, and seeing the governor-general seated at the door of a shop in the bazaar, went to him with his dragoman, and told him that he ought to bring his police agents to justice for killing the Christian blacksmith. He had himself gone to see him before his death, and had verified the fact of its having been caused by a severe blow on the head. The Pasha made no reply to him, but complained to the Porte of the irregularity of this proceeding on the part of a person not holding a consular position, at the same time forwarding a certificate from a native doctor to prove that the blacksmith had died of a liver complaint of long standing. The case was referred by the Porte to the English embassy, where it was known through a report from the nearest English consulate, sent after a full inquiry into all the facts.

The only result was an instruction to warn the Englishman to abstain for the future from meddling in matters which did not concern him.

Quite recently, a town in the same part of the country, inhabited solely by Christians, has suffered wholesale persecution by the Turkish police. Arrears of taxes were due, and a detachment of constables was sent to collect them. Houses were ransacked with the utmost violence, and effects were exposed for sale at any price. A complaint was forwarded to the governorgeneral of the province, who hastened to the town alluded to, and he was received by its whole population with every possible mark of respect. He promised to give them time for the payment of their arrears, the great accumulation of which has been the almost universal and timehonored consequence, in the Asiatic provinces, of bribing the collectors to let them stand over. The people were now too poor to furnish the usual gratuities, to obtain which, by extortion and terror, the police agents were acting with such rigor. The Pasha's back was hardly turned when the persecution recommenced as violently as ever. One of the Christians, in his exasperation at seeing his wife and children thus deprived of their bedding and household utensils, shot the constable who was carrying them off. Troops were brought from the chief provincial city to quell a so-called bold insurrection. Many of the Christians fled to the mountains, and their wives and children were arrested and escorted by the police to that chief city, which is a hundred and fifty miles distant. It was cold and rainy as the women were driven along. One of them was in feeble health, and begged to be allowed to stop at a village on the road. She was refused, and, unable to bear up longer, she lay down and died. A priest wrote a paper for collective signature to lay the grievances of the town before the Porte. He was arrested, stripped, and beaten in presence of the troops. A telegraphic report was dispatched by the governor-general to the Grand Vizier, declaring that a Russian plot, headed by priests, and inciting the Christians to revolt, had been discovered, and successfully counteracted and completely frustrated by him. The plain truth is that the Turkish police agents were the only firebrands in the whole affair. Numerous arrests were effected, and some of the chief inhabitants of the place were handcuffed and chained by the neck and feet in a standing posture in a prison flooded with several inches of water, half frozen over. The last intelligence received is that the Christians had risen in a body and broken open the prison, liberating the Christian prisoners, and putting the Turkish police agents in their place in the same prison.

on the many recent instances of abominable conduct on the part of the police department in Asiatic Turkey. Suffice it to say that in one town of about one hundred thousand inhabitants, during the year just closed, no less than one hundred and ninety-three murders have been committed, while only two murderers have been brought to justice; and even in their case no credit is due to the provincial government, because every possible effort was made by the authorities for the purpose of screening them from the punishment which was insisted upon by the British consulate, armed with a legal right to interfere. In consequence of this utter inefficiency of the police department in that town, nothing but contempt was felt for the constabulary force, and in one case an officer with thirty constables was mobbed in the streets, and a prisoner, arrested for some imaginary offense because able to pay a heavy ransom, was forcibly taken from them. The governor-general then gave one hundred pounds per month to an influential Mussulman to keep the town quiet. This local magnate made a few of his own people patrol the streets, and put the money in his pocket, without any improvement in security of life and property being attained. The same system is followed in the villages, which are pillaged with impunity by the retainers of powerful chiefs who have obtained such contracts by large bribes to the authorities. The facts cursorily related above will not, probably, leave room for any doubt that the police department in the Turkish provinces of Asia is conspicuous for the absence of every quality that could make it useful, and stands in the most deplorable need of immediate and complete reorganization.

The judicial department is the next field which requires the application of strong measures to remedy its inherent defects, if these Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire can be expected to rise from their present state of absolute collapse to that level of good government which could alone sanction their protection by England. Judgment in causes is exclusively given in favor of the side which makes the highest bid for it. Professional witnesses crowd the doors of all the courts of law, ready to swear whatever may be required, and receiving payment in advance according to the amount involved in a civil suit, or the importance of the evidence for the prisoner or the prosecutor in a criminal case. These are Mussulmans, of course-Christian and Jewish witnesses not being admitted to testify, on the plea that by the Koranic law their oath is not legal. Some of the recent trials in Asiatic Turkey are so striking that they can not fail to convey an idea of the enormity of the injustice prevailing there. In one case, two trustworthy MussulIt would be as superfluous as tedious to dwell man witnesses had their depositions rejected af

ter a nocturnal visit by the prisoner's relatives to all the members of the tribunal. Although those two witnesses swore that they had seen the prisoner stab the murdered man, he was acquitted. The son of the victim of the crime applied, as prosecutor, for an inquiry into this suspicious proceeding, and a paper was found in the record of the trial, bearing ten seals and signatures purporting to be those of the best reputed householders in the quarter of the town to which the two witnesses belonged, and declaring them to be men of bad character, and accustomed to perjure themselves before the courts of justice for hire. The ten householders were summoned, and, on being questioned, they swore that they had not sealed or signed any such document, and that they knew the two witnesses to be very good men, and quite incapable of taking a false oath. The whole proceedings in the case were quashed, and a new trial was ordered; but this was not obtained without the strongest possible pressure from without, in the form of a serious remonstrance from the British consulate. By Mussulman law a criminal case can not be tried without there being a "davaji,' or prosecutor, who must be the next of kin of the person suffering by the crime, if that person be dead. The son of the murdered man had been very active and intelligent in his exertions to bring his father's murderers to justice. The device resorted to by the friends of the murderer first arrested was in perfect keeping with Turkish character. Another murder had just been reported. A young girl had threatened to complain to her absent uncle of the treatment she received from his wife, and had been strangled in the night by the wife and her mother. An accusation was immediately brought against the son of the man previously murdered, and a proposal was made to him to withdraw the charge on condition of his giving up the prosecution of his father's murderer. He rejected the offer, and was put on his trial. The wife and her mother swore to having seen him strangle the girl, and the innocent youth was condemned to be hanged. He has not been executed, for what reason does not appear; but he remains in prison under sentence of death, the object in view having been attained by his being prevented from acting as prosecutor. The new trial could not have gone on if it had not been for the vigorous efforts of the English consulate, which also succeeded in having another of the murderers captured. They were tried together, and sentence of twelve years' imprisonment was passed on both of them. If the English consulate had not taken up the prosecution officially, satisfying thereby the quasi-legal scruples of the law officers of the Porte by exercising the treaty right of protecting a consular guard-for this

was the status of the murdered man-the trial would have arrived at no practical result.

Justice was soon again tampered with by the same tribunal in a case of murder in a village. Two men had been seen by many witnesses putting an enemy of theirs to death, and ample evidence was given quite regularly, but neither of the prisoners was punished, the one having distributed one hundred and sixty pounds, and the other one hundred and fifty pounds among the members of the tribunal. The prosecutor, seeing the murderers at large, has presented ten successive memorials to the Government, but without the least notice being taken of them.

In another instance there was not even a trial. An elderly Christian woman earned a livelihood for her infirm husband and numerous family by acting as a broker for the sale of jewels in the harems of the wealthier class of Mussulmans. One day she was told to take all the jewels she had for sale to a house where she had occasionally been employed in her calling. Her husband accompanied her to the door of the harem, and said he would wait there for her, as he had been in the habit of doing. After he had stood at the door for several hours he knocked, and three negresses appeared, and he asked them to tell his wife to come to him. They denied that his wife had come to the house that day, and treated him as a madman. He went home, hoping that she had, unseen by the black slaves, left the harem by some other door, and gone to their own house; but nothing had been heard of her there. For several days he went about the town inquiring for her without success. At last he happened to meet in the street the youngest of the three negresses whom he had seen at the Turkish house, a girl of fifteen; she stopped him, saying she was so sorry for him, that she would tell him the whole truth; and she then related how her mistress had taken his wife into a room where there was a trap-door opening above a deep vault, and there asked her to show the jewels she had brought. They were carefully examined, and placed on a divan. Her mistress then, with the help of the two other female slaves, pushed the poor woman into the vault, and closed the trap-door over her. All this the girl said she had seen; and she added that they had heard his wife's cries until late at night, and supposed that she must then have died from the effects of her fall. In the morning, she continued, the body was taken out by a small staircase leading down to the vault from the courtyard, and buried in the garden by the same black slaves. Armed with this statement, the husband laid an accusation against both the Turkish lady and her two negresses. The tribunal ordered a domiciliary visit to the house, but nothing was found

that could inculpate any one. He then applied for the summoning of the young negress to give evidence, but she was not summoned, and no trial took place, the husband of the lady being high in office, rich and influential, which were three good reasons for screening his wife from justice. The jewels obtained by this abominable crime were worth eight hundred pounds, and their different owners, who had merely intrusted them to the murdered woman for sale, never heard more of them, though it is believed that the president and members of the tribunal had been requested, not without compliance, to select a few of them for the use of their harems.

In a case of robbery, still pending, a Christian merchant lost two hundred pounds from his strong box, which had been forced open before daybreak. He applied for the arrest of a Mussulman miller, whom his servants had seen running across the courtyard of his house at that time. A trial took place, but this evidence was not admitted, the servants being Christians. The Mussulman workmen of the mill were then called as witnesses by the plaintiff, and they deposed on oath that the miller had left them before daylight on that Sunday morning, having worked all night, and had returned after daylight breathless with running, and without his shoes. A pair of shoes was found close to the strong box in the merchant's house which fitted the prisoner perfectly, and were also sprinkled with flour, as if coming from a mill. This was not thought enough to condemn him against the all-powerful testimony of a share of the money stolen, which was said to have been presented to the tribunal. The merchant was informed by its president that, if he did not bring within a fixed term two Mussulman witnesses of the act of taking the two hundred pounds from the strong box the prisoner would be acquitted.

With reference to civil causes tried before the ordinary court two may be mentioned as recently concluded. The guardian of a family of orphans, a Christian, sued a Mussulman for a sum of two hundred and forty pounds which had been lent to him by their deceased father. The debt was denied by the Mussulman, and witnesses were called to prove it, the first of whom deposed clearly in favor of the plaintiff, though the witness was a Mussulman. The registrar of the court commenced writing the deposition in the record of the trial, when the president interrupted him and dictated to him a statement as clearly in favor of the defendant. The witness was begged by the plaintiff to repeat his evidence, which he did in the identical words of the president. The plaintiff then withdrew his suit, regretting aloud that he had paid the fees in advance, as it was vain to expect justice from a

Turkish tribunal. In the other civil case alluded to a Jew was sued by a Mussulman for one hundred and eighty pounds in part payment for a house which the latter had sold to the former. While stating the grounds of his suit the Mussulman plaintiff was stopped by a Mussulman member of the court, who said that he could never gain his cause in that way, and who dictated to the registrar, for insertion in the record of the trial, another statement of facts, and a line of argument altogether different. The defendant objected to this mode of proceeding, and was ordered by the president to keep silence, or he might otherwise be imprisoned for contempt of court. The poor Jew bowed to this injunction, and humbly produced the plaintiff's receipt, in his own handwriting, for the whole of the price of the house, of a part of which he now now claimed payment a second time. Two most influential Mussulmans were brought forward to swear that the receipt was a forgery, not written by the plaintiff, and not sealed with his own seal. These witnesses could not be classed with those who habitually swear anything for money, being rich and respected; but there is a practice among the best-reputed Mussulmans to lend their testimony, and these two had causes pending in favor of which the present plaintiff would give evidence in return. The Jew was condemned to disburse the one hundred and eighty pounds, and he paid the amount at once, asking only that this second settlement of the account should be registered by the court, to prevent its being claimed a third time, and sentence being again passed against him by the same court for the same sum. This was received as an excellent joke by the president and members of the tribunal, who laughed heartily as they counted the coin, calculating doubtless how much of it would fall to their own share.

A great commercial cause, the trial of which has lasted eight years, offers an apt illustration of the mode of administering justice in the Turkish provinces of Asia, so striking are its details, and so important will be its results. A native Christian merchant sent an agent to open a house of business in Manchester in connection with his own in Turkey. For a couple of years there was perfect regularity in their payments, but, when their credit was well established, a colossal swindle was attempted, showing the purpose with which the branch house had been founded. A large quantity of manufactured goods was bought from forty different sellers, to whom strong assurances were given that the amount in payment would be remitted by the foreign principal of the English firm, who was stated to be the moneyed partner in it. The goods were shipped under consignment to this native merchant, and he

promptly sold them at any price which he could obtain without delay. The purchase money was never remitted to Manchester. The agent there became a bankrupt, and the creditors, finding no assets, sued the native merchant in Asiatic Turkey, as his partner. The case seems so very simple, that it is hardly credible that a court of justice exists anywhere capable of keeping it up so long. It is said to have cost the defendant, in the province and at the capital on appeal, no less than six thousand pounds, to stave off a final judgment against him; but he can afford even that enormous amount of bribery, considering that the claim brought forward exceeds twentynine thousand pounds.

Another great commercial cause is pending in a neighboring province, which also has lasted several years. An English merchant invested upward of twenty thousand pounds in business of a nature apparently promising fair profits. He purchased about twenty villages for the facilitation of a trade in the exportation of cotton. He then went home, leaving a native partner in charge of his affairs. During ten years he found that, instead of receiving any return from his capital, he was called upon to make frequent remittances for the purpose of carrying on his speculation. At last he visited the province himself to inquire into the state of his interests. On the third day after his arrival he died suddenly. Suspicions of foul play very naturally arose, but a consular investigation did not corroborate them. His heirs in England sent out a lawyer to liquidate their inheritance, and he appointed two agents, a Frenchman and a native Christian, to carry out the object in view. Those two agents conceived a deep scheme of robbery. The Frenchman expressed a wish that a strong letter of recommendation should be addressed by a British consular authority to the Turkish governor-general of the province in which the villages were situated. The English lawyer readily agreed to this, and he applied by mistake to a consular officer not holding the Queen's commission for the jurisdiction which he assumed in that part of the consular district of another British consulate. A daring device was resorted to for shifting all responsibility from the French agent, who was possessed of some property, to the native agent, who had not a farthing in the world. Means were found of dictating the terms of the letter of recommendation in the Turkish language, which that consular officer did not understand, and in it the native was alone mentioned as the agent for the liquidation of the deceased Englishman's estate. They then commenced together to carry out the audacious fraud on which they were intent. They concealed the existence of several most valuable villages, which they sold, appro

priating to themselves the proceeds of the sales; and they collected the outstanding debts, formed by advances made for the purchase of cotton, taking care to receive always a little less than the full amounts due, so that the bonds and bills representing the debts should remain in their hands, lest they might ever be required to account for the sums, for the payment of which they contrived to give no receipts. Remittances not being made by them to the heirs in England, another representative was dispatched to see into the matter. He soon understood the whole truth, and he brought an action against the Frenchman. It was tried before the French consular court at the chief station of the consular district. To the Englishman's utter amazement, the defense made was simply the production of the British consular letter of recommendation, stating that the native was the sole agent for winding up the affairs of the estate. In vain the Englishman pleaded that no British consular officer's letter could annul the power of attorney delivered by a British subject. Judgment was given against him, and it was confirmed by the appeal court of Aix, where he carried his case. There thus remained only the native to prosecute, and the cause became amenable to Turkish justice alone. In spite of this feeble hope of success, the Englishman thought it his duty to proceed. Every possible obstacle was placed in his way. The Frenchman, in throwing the onus of their joint swindle on the native alone, had bound himself to protect him from all evil consequences, and he has hitherto been quite successful in doing so. The Turkish authorities have exercised the chicanery which they possess in so great a degree to frustrate the ends of justice, and it is not difficult to comprehend the means employed to inspire so much zeal. They even went so far as to allow the defendant to give a merely nominal bail, and he of course absconded, but, through energetic measures taken by the British consul really holding the Queen's commission for jurisdiction in that province, he has now been found and brought back to stand his trial.

In municipal cases most of the minor offenses giving rise to them are punished by fines, levied indiscriminately from the guilty and from the innocent. Bribery is not so rife in these cases, for the elementary reason that a more profitable practice is followed. The fines collected have to be sent by monthly payments to the Treasury with a register referring to receipts given for the fines; but, when they are being received, a smaller sum is accepted, the receipt to be given when the remainder is called for, which is never the case. The fine is thus omitted in the register, and the money is divided every evening among those composing the municipal court.

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