Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/50

 revision in that year. As a matter of course, the embassy failed. The conditions originally necessitating consular jurisdiction had not undergone any change justifying its abolition. Neither the character of Japan's laws nor the methods of her judicial procedure were such as to warrant foreign Governments in entrusting to her care the lives and properties of their subjects and citizens.

It must be confessed, on the other hand, that the consular courts themselves were not beyond reproach. A few of the Great Powers, notably England and the United States, organised competent tribunals and appointed expert judicial officials to preside over them. But a majority of the treaty States were content to delegate consular duties to merchants, who not only lacked legal training of any kind, but were themselves engaged in the commercial transactions upon which they might at any moment be required to adjudicate in a magisterial capacity. Thus it happened, sometimes, that a Japanese subject desiring to invoke the aid of the law against a foreigner who seemed to have wronged him, found that the defendant in the case would also be the judge. Under any circumstances, the dual functions of consul and judge could not be discharged by the same official without anomaly, for the rôle of consul compelled him to act as advocate in the initiatory stages of complications about which his rôle of judge might ultimately require him to deliver an impartial ruling. It would be an