Among the reforms contemporaneous with the Chino-Japan war (1894), the remedy for the existing maladministration of justice in Korea naturally had a prominent place. Some of the forms of injustice then in common use—such as the bribing of judges and the punishment of accused persons without even the semblance of a trial—had no justification under Korean law, so far as law existed at that time. Other equally deplorable forms of injustice were, however, strictly legal;—as, for example, the infliction of penalties on the innocent relatives of a condemned criminal, and the imprisonment of the household of an official charged with extortion. In particular, the use of torture—barbarous in kind and extreme in cruelty—was in “full accord” with the legal system of the Ming dynasty in China, which formed the basis of the Korean code. Of the older forms of torture some, such as crushing the knee-caps, slitting the nostrils, applying pincers or hot irons, had already been in 1894 abolished by the Ming dynasty; but a great number of equally painful forms of torture were still legally in practice at that time. Among such were seating the victim on hot coals, driving splinters under the toe-nails, applying fire to the feet and hands, pounding the shins, and squeezing the ankles. On the eleventh of January, 1895, however, the Minister of Justice obtained the king’s assent to the abolition of all the more severe forms of torture _except in capital cases_. To enforce confession of guilt by beating with a stick was still to be allowed.[77] The reforms promised and inaugurated in 1895, with respect to the improvement of the administration of justice, like all the other reforms of that time, scarcely went beyond the so-called “paper stage.” Some forms of torture were, indeed, no longer customarily practised; but on the whole the barbarous treatment of accused and convicted criminals was not greatly improved. In civil cases the practice of the Court and of the magistrates was never worse than during the period preceding the Russo-Japanese war. It was, as has already been shown (p. 233 _f._), “an orgy of independence.”