The status and rank of the various courts established and the limits of the authority of each have never been made clear to the Russian population. Chinese law is applied, and no code in any European language has been made available to the Russian population. Whatever the Chinese code is, it 4 only available to the erudite an Sinologues are not numerous in the Russian commercial communities of Manchuria. The Chinese Janguage is used in the courts and in official reports, so that the population is at the mercy of Chinese lawyers and interpreters. There has been no opportunity of course to develop a class.of lawyers in China upon whose professional attainments a client can rely. or whose practice is guided by traditions of professional ethics. In Harbin the Chinese lawyers who have appeared in the wake of the new courts advertise in the papers and the Russian who has a grievance and wishes to ''go to law" has to choose between them. The chief procurator of the Court of Assizes has himself announced in a proclamotion that among those who call themselves lawyers there are many "thieves" and "extorters of money" who try to obtain clients by pretending to be on friendly terms with the magistrates. Their charges are very high as are those of interpreter and yet without these functionaries it is impossible for the average Russian either to file a suit or to defend himself in a Chinese court. The poor' simply do without law.
Tue Murper or Mr. Winpow.
Official interpreters are few and far between.
The court of assizes has only three and it is said that these are not over competent. The average Russians, who cannot get access to these persons, are forced to avail themselves of the public interpreters who linger about the courts and who are for the most part ex-cooks and ex-boys who intr@luce the client into the mazes of Chinese justice with a scant equipment of pidgin Russian. The competence of the official inter-. preters is eloquently set forth in the story of the Chinese judge who justice in a great variety of cases,; passed sentence upon a Russian charged with breaking a window as a murderer, believing all the while that he was hearing a murder case that the defendant was accused and pleaded guilty to "the murder of Mr. Window."
In another case the efficiency of the courts in handling Russian affairs was exemplified when two persons, Kegel and Minter were arrested for having arms in their possession. They were charged a8 Keger and Miger, but during the hearing they became Didil and Mandil. Again—in January a coachman drove some unknown criminals to the shop of Tchourine Ca. The fares entered, exploded some sort of a bomb and fled. An employee of the shop was killed and two other persons were hurt. The coachman, whose innocence was established at the start, was held ten days in prison and in the order for his arrest it was written: "ac-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.