(2) _Court of First Instance._--Occasionally the Amir sits as a Court of First Instance, when it is permitted to all persons to approach him with grievances, disputes or claims as they would any other magistrate. Whether it is an appeal or an original case, the modes of trial in civil law are the same. The plaintiff brings his witnesses with him, if it is necessary to have any witness at all, and the defendant brings his witnesses also. Both sides are heard and the case decided upon the spot, the inordinate delay which distinguishes judicial procedure in England being avoided. The various codes of law are so numerous that they would fill at least a dozen bulky volumes. Every official, the holders of all offices, great or small, in Afghanistan has a manual signed or sealed by the Amir, on which he acts. Instructions are so minute, moreover, that it is a common saying in Afghanistan that there is not a donkey-driver in the country who does not possess a signature of the Amir to some document, giving him the law which he is to obey. All classes are amenable to the law, and in theory there is no exemption or special laws--not even for the nearest relatives of the Amir, as was once proved when a favourite wife of the late Abdur Rahman was ordered by him to answer in the courts to the summons of a firm of Parsee milliners. Judicial corruption, however, makes evasion of the law neither difficult nor infrequent, and bribery is the cause of a general miscarriage of justice. The condition of the Criminal Law is singularly barbarous; and no attempt, even upon paper or in theory, has been made to mitigate its crude severity. There is no fixed limit for the various punishments, and, although sentences of death need to be confirmed by the Amir, torture is invariably applied in all cases of criminal procedure. The instrument more generally used is known as the Fanah, a contrivance not unlike the “boot.” There are many things in the Afghan code which are susceptible of improvement for the whim of the Amir is law, and, at best, he is no better than an amiable despot whose caprice demands immediate realisation. In this, Afghanistan is far removed from the condition of the native States of India and the territories of Bokhara, where, if justice is also tempered with bribery and corruption, life is at least respected until the innocent are proved to be guilty. Not so in the Amir’s country, where men are still blown from guns and penalties of equal brutality exacted for comparatively trivial offences.