The reform went so far that it even tried to introduce a kind of civil marriage, whereas up till now all marriages, divorces, and everything to do with inheritance had taken place exclusively before religious officials. I may just add that these newest reforms give women no wider rights than they had before. Perhaps this may be taken as an indication that they have been conceived far less from a social than from a political point of view. What induced the Turkish Government to introduce anything so entirely modern as civil marriage in defiance of age-old custom was more than likely the desire to put an end to non-Turkish Ottomans contracting marriages and making arrangements about inheritance, etc., before their own privileged, ethnically independent organisations, and so to deal the final death-blow to the Armenian and Greek Patriarchates. If Family Law was modernised in this way, there would not be the faintest shadow of excuse left for the existence of these institutions which enjoyed a far-reaching and influential autonomy. The Armenian Patriarchate got short shrift indeed. By dissolving the Patriarchate in the Capital, breaking off all relations with the Armenian headquarters in Etzmiadjin and allowing only a very small remainder of Patriarchate to be sent up in Jerusalem under special State supervision, the Turks, as a logical sequence to the Armenian atrocities, simply dealt the death-blow in the summer of 1916 to this important social institution. The Greek organisation, however, conducted by a more numerous and, outwardly at any rate, better protected people, offered far more resistance, and could not be simply wiped out with a stroke of the pen. A direct attempt to suppress it was made as early as 1910, but broke down entirely in face of the firm attitude of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople. Now the Young Turks seem to have come to the conclusion that less drastic methods, beginning on a juristic basis, may have a better effect. We have taken this one example in order to get at the whole neo-Turkish method of procedure. It consists in pushing forward, if need be with greater delicacy than before and on the round-about road of real modern reforms, towards the one immovable goal: the complete Turkification of Turkey. The reform of the law, which we have treated more exhaustively as an example of the first rank, is typical of the Young Turkish national tendency. Naturally it has its use, too, as a means of further throwing off the foreign political yoke. Through the modernising of the whole Turkish legal system, Europe is to be shown that the Capitulations can be dispensed with.