During the period from 1839 to 1841, when the Concert of Europe intervened in the second Syrian war between Sultan Mahmoud and Mehemet Ali Pasha of Egypt to save the Ottoman Empire from destruction, Lord Palmerston the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs energetically opposed a return to the status quo ante helium in the Levant, risked the development of a serious international crisis in Near Eastern affairs, and played a leading rôle in the negotiation and execution of an arrangement by which Syria and Crete were restored to the direct rule of the Sultan and by which the authority of Mehemet Ali was confined to Egypt. The story of these developments is a familiar one; yet it is not generally known that at the same time when Palmerston was energetically attempting to exploit events in the East to bring about a settlement of the Turco-Egyptian Question in the interest of the Sultan he was also actively elaborating and extending a policy for the rejuvenation of Turkey which he had outlined in a period of peace in the Levant between 1833 and 1839.