Such vigorous measures would have had a great effect on France, and there is no knowing what might have happened. This was not done; and Ibrahim, without making one effort to draw our attention from Acre, or to profit by our absence, remained inactive, and to his astonishment, heard of the surrender of that renowned fortress, which he had not in the least calculated upon. Still his cause was not lost; our troops were divided in Beyrout, Sidon, Tyre, and Acre, and, I believe, we had also some at Tripoli. The gale of the 29th of November alarmed the Admiral for the safety of the squadron. The coast was abandoned, except by a steamer or two, and there was nothing whatever to have prevented Ibrahim from again advancing, and recovering all his losses, and which he would have been perfectly justified in doing when the Convention was rejected. Why he did not, to every military man acquainted with the country, and with our weakness, must be a matter of surprise. Had any of these operations I have described been put in force, Mehemet Ali would have been now in Syria, and a war among the European Powers in all probability would have been raging. We will now examine what Turkey has gained by the recovery of the Syrian provinces. She has got back her fleet, which will never be of the least use to her, and is an expensive floating ornament to the Seraglio. Situated as the Turkish empire is, with a rapid stream cutting her in two, it is evident her only proper defence is a fleet of steamboats; with these, and the Bosphorus and Hellespont properly fortified, she may defy attacks either from the north or the south, and have a rapid means of communicating with her islands and possessions on the Syrian coasts, and of suddenly transporting troops to any part of her extensive empire. The Turks are not sailors, and never will be, and are therefore much better adapted to serve in vessels moved by steam than in line-of-battle ships, where seamanship cannot be dispensed with.