(NOTE. The writer of the following article, at that time a Lieutenant Colonel in the Judge Advocate General's Department of the United States Army, was a member of the American Military Mission to Armenia, which, by direction of the President, visited the Near East under the leadership of Major General James G. Harbord in August, 1919. The instructions given to the mission, he reminds us, called for an investigation and report upon political, military, geographic, administrative, economic, and other considerations "involved in possible American interests and responsibilities in that region," the area covering, generally speaking, Asia Minor and the Transcaucasus, including the new republics recently established on former Russian territory, of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The mission reported that in its judgment the remedy for the deplorable conditions then existing was "a mandatory control to be exercised by a single Great Power." It coupled this finding with an insistence on the necessity of including Asia Minor and the Caucasian republics within the sphere of such control, and of making the mandates, if accepted by America, subject to very specific conditions guarantying her complete freedom of control and immunity from European interference in matters political, financial, and commercial, as essential to the success of such an experiment. The offer presented to the United States by the

Great Powers, several months after the filing of this report, for the taking of a mandate for an isolated Armenia, was in direct conflict with the conditions referred to, and was speedily rejected by the Senate, and the settlement of the Near Eastern problem has proceeded along very different lines from those suggested in the Harbord report. The report of the mission was drafted with a view of outlining the problems of reform and reorganization which were likely to be found. most pressing in the event of the assumption of a mandate by America, and necessarily included a study of the all-important problems of judicial reform, which fell within the scope of the labors assigned to Colonel Brinton. The accompanying article, prepared by him at the request of the Editor, is based upon the studies made at that time, and which have been embodied at length in Colonel Brinton's report on "Government" annexed to the principal report of the mission as filed with the President.-EDITOR.)

INTRODUCTORY.

While, at the moment, America is not officially interested in the problem of judicial reform in Turkey, there is included among the provisions of the Treaty of Sevres one which requires the acceptance by Turkey of a scheme of judicial reform to be drafted by the principal allied powers with the assistance of technical experts of the other capitulatory powers, allied or