Illustration: VIEW OF MODERN JERUSALEM FROM THE MOUNT OF OLIVES.
Jerusalem is a cosmopolitan city, where the representatives from all nations congregate and live. Amounting to 20,000 souls, the present population is divided into classes according to their religious opinions, and each sect occupies a separate portion of the town called “Quarters.” The Turk is now in power, swaying his iron sceptre, which he has held for more than six hundred years. The city having been elevated to the dignity of a distinct pashalic, the Pasha is appointed by the Sultan, and comes from Constantinople. The municipal government is civil and military. The civil governor is assisted by a delegated council of Moslems, of which one Jew and one Christian are members by sufferance, to represent the interests of their respective churches. Criminal and civil justice is administered by a city judge, called the “Cadi,” who is judge and jury, and whose decisions are law, whether the dictates of an impartial judgment or the sentence of a bribed magistrate. The military department is under Bim-Pasha, the most dreaded of all the government officials. His troops perform the double duty of garrison and police, guarding the gates during the day and patroling the streets at night. Destitute of courtesy and the finer feelings of our humanity, they are the most brutal class of men on the globe, who are respected because they are dreaded, and feared because they are vindictive. The palaces of the civil and military governors of the city are in the northwest corner of the Haram; the common council holds its sessions in what was once the hall of the Jewish Sanhedrim, and the soldiers have their barracks in the Hippic Tower and in the Tower of Antonia, where is still the city prison.
The government is supported by taxation, which is as heavy as the military collectors are exacting. Every expedient is resorted to to avoid the payment of a tax which is imposed with rapacity and gathered with rigor. Under the pretense of poverty, rich Jews live in filth and go through the streets in rags; and to escape the system of espionage which the grasping Turk has established, both Arabs and Christians secrete their treasures in fields and cellars.