The Porte has regained Syria, and with it a most extensive kingdom and discontented population, and instead of keeping her army at home to defend her against Russia, her natural enemy, she is obliged to maintain a large force in Syria to keep down her justly irritated subjects, whom she has neither the talent nor inclination to govern either with prudence or decency. Syria is divided, as before, into pachalics, and influential Turks are appointed, as usual, to govern them. There is neither law nor justice. The Turk sits all day smoking his pipe, and the people are plundered by their underlings as usual; and they now feel they were better off under the government of Mehemet Ali than they are now under their former masters. They pay the taxes they formerly did under the Porte; they pay Mehemet Ali’s taxes in addition, and are plundered into the bargain by their old rulers. Property of every description is less protected than it was, trade destroyed, and the roads insecure throughout the country. As for Mount Lebanon, whose population was the first to come forward and join our bands, and whose position the Allies and the Turks themselves promised to alleviate—how have they been treated? As yet they have received little or no remuneration for the burning of their villages and destruction of their property by Ibrahim Pacha, in revenge for their having joined the standard of the Sultan. They have been badly paid for the losses we ourselves caused them at D’Jounie, at Beyrout, Acre, and Sidon. The old feuds between the Maronites and Druses, which had nearly subsided, have been fomented by their rulers, and I fear Mehemet Ali himself, as might have been foreseen, has not been altogether blameless in assisting to set them by the ears. In the course of my work it has been shown that the Maronites were the first to take up arms in the cause of the Sultan. The Druses being more under the influence of the old Emir Bechir, came forward at a later period, and when the war was nearly finished, they became jealous of the Maronites; and the Turks, instead of by prudent management discouraging these feelings, rather fomented them, with the view of weakening both. The mountaineers had been armed during the insurrection, and they are looked upon more as enemies, than friends who had assisted in bringing them back to power.