“A few words now to show how the prisoners were treated. According to the Code of Criminal Procedure the accused has a right to choose his own advocate, and to have free communication with him. In the present trial the advocate was chosen by some anonymous personage in the Palace, without the accused having been consulted as to the choice, and free communication was not allowed. On this subject Midhat asserts that he saw his counsel only twice. On the first occasion they had only time to read about an eighth part of the indictment, and on the second they were favoured with the presence of Raghib Bey, one of the Sultan’s private secretaries, who listened to all that was said. Worse than this, with prodigious ingenuity each advocate was entrusted with the duty of defending prisoners belonging to different categories and employing mutually contradictory modes of defence. Refik Effendi, for example, was ordered to defend on the one hand Mustapha the Wrestler—who confessed his own guilt, and accused Fahri of having taken an active part in the assassination—and on the other hand the said Fahri, who maintained that Abdul Aziz committed suicide. In like manner Shukri Effendi had to defend on the one hand Midhat, and on the other hand Nouri Pasha, who endeavoured to exculpate himself at Midhat’s expense. The idea of crippling the defence in this ingenious way is exquisitely Oriental, and rendered almost superfluous the half‐pathetic, half‐menacing exhortation made to the advocates at the Palace that they should refrain from adding to the Sultan’s numerous embarrassments and trust to His Majesty’s clemency. Equally Oriental and characteristic is the fact that the learned gentlemen who undertook the so‐called defence on such conditions, showed no signs of being ashamed of themselves. It is hardly necessary to say that they carefully abstained from cross‐questioning the witnesses and sifting the evidence, and did not object when the President and the Public Prosecutor assumed important facts without proving them. “With regard to the way in which Midhat was threatened, it is difficult to speak without using strong terms of indignation. Not a particle of carefully sifted evidence against him was produced, and he was refused means of defending himself against the unsubstantiated assertions of his accusers, though he proved from the Code that he was asking no more than he had a right to demand. If his sentence is carried out, his execution will be simply a judicial murder, perpetrated from motives of political vengeance and personal enmity. As for the other prisoners, I cannot pretend to say whether they really committed the crime with which they are charged, but I can unhesitatingly assert that their guilt was not legally proved.