II. The Inhabitants of the Land: Village and City

The inhabitants of the whole world divide into two classes: townsfolk and villagers. The townsfolk, building great cities in the most favorable places, dwell within them; while the villagers have chosen the plains, and building little villages far apart one from another, they occupy themselves with tillage alone. The townsfolk's occupation is craft and commerce, and a small part of them also hold the various offices of the country's administration. Ask, then, Tornik: what difference is there between townsfolk and villagers — what are the better and the worse of the life each leads, what its well-being and its misery?

The picture of town life and village life is very broad; I shall tell you only the chief differences, as they show themselves to us in their outward look, and leave the remaining parts for you to fathom yourself. Dear Tornik, you are not shut up in the village; you go continually to the city and come back; you can observe everything with your own eye; and since you have some measure of learning, are thoughtful, and are of full age, you can judge and weigh for yourself both our life and the townsfolk's. Each has its sweetness and its bitterness, its well-being and its misery, its virtue and its vice; they have many good and evil sides, and of many kinds — for our life is a mixture: evil and good live together, as wheat and tare spring up and grow together.¹

It appears to us that the townsfolk lead a most happy and comfortable life. Take for example the city of Van, which is so near us: the handsome high-built houses; the broad streets; the willows planted row on row at the edge of the waters that run murmuring through many of the streets. We enter the houses and see beautiful rooms all patterned and painted, adorned with comely furnishings. The townsman's table is very rich, with sweet and savory dishes, prepared by the patriarchal household.

And then, Tornik, how pretty and graceful to our eyes appear the shapely garments of every fashion — very costly, the men's and the women's alike; nor let us forget those rows upon rows of gold necklaces that the women and girls hang from their throats. Beyond these bodily comforts and pleasures, the townsfolk have spiritual and moral enjoyments also: their churches and the church's vestments are splendid and glorious; the festal ceremonies, the sweet-voiced choristers, the solemn processions and liturgies — and more than all, the well-ordered preaching vardapets,² who are the glory of the church and the consolation of the people.

Apart from religious and spiritual consolation, the townsfolk have yet another great consolation — the school and house of learning, where their boys and their girls learn to read and write. In this the townsfolk have a very great advantage over us; for only by education does man become man: he casts off rudeness and coarseness, and is made a useful member of human society, of the state of the land, of his people and of his family. Whereas, on the contrary, the ignorant and untaught man is useless and harmful to his state, his people, and his family.

Alas, noble Tornik, that your Papik cannot discourse at length, to describe and show you what knowledge is and what ignorance is. Do you not know — did your schoolmaster not teach you — that knowledge is light, and ignorance darkness? Did you not read the word of our holy Yeghishe:³ as the blind man is deprived of the rays of the sun, so is the ignorant man deprived of the perfect life? Even as we villagers are deprived of the perfect life, both morally and materially. But you must mark it well, Tornik, and not suppose that the townsfolk's condition is comfortable all alike. No — do not judge so. The great part of the townsfolk have a most wretched and bitter life: with heavy labor they win their daily food; they live in the strictest penury; they go wanting for a bowl of tanapur;⁴ it is great fortune if they have one cow or one goat. You will see their houses, little different from our hovels; you will see their clothes worn out and tattered, and their faces without cheer or briskness; wearied the day long with the cares of their households, they go about idle and without work — and for the greater part it is by their own sloth that they have come to that state.

There are also, among the class of townsfolk, men of such a kind as would earn credit by covering their inner rottenness and misery with outward show: they change into ever-new clothes and talk of great things, so that you would say, here is a moneyed man of substance who keeps a flourishing house; but enter his house, and you will find it empty even of the needful goods of life — no bread in the trough, not a spoonful of butter in the crock. How then do they live? Eh, Tornik, do not ask that; let me make you understand it in three words: "by deceit, and sundry portions thereof."⁵ The townsfolk, though they are educated after a fashion, and have in social life some little grace of civility, yet day by day the corruptions of immoral living increase among them. Dear Tornik, I remember — fifty years since, the town families were each one patriarchal houses, God-fearing and reverent, lovers of the church-hour and of prayer; when the sexton went out at cockcrow to sound the call, the whole family of the house would waken, and the men would go with the children to church. Thus the pious fathers of that day trained their sons, from boyhood's age, in piety — by their own good examples. For the parents' way of teaching was nothing else: more than precept and word, it was the good example. And do you know, Tornik — one good example is worth a thousand precepts. That good time has passed and gone, and taken with it those virtuous patriarchal men. The present time has brought new men into the world; for every age has its own men. Now the world is changed: men love progress — only, what are the condition, the means, and the aim of true progress? That they do not yet know. Our townsfolk have grasped but one part of progress: to gain money and grow rich — by what means it comes about, let it come about. The spirit of avarice and greed of gain has grown so fierce that in buying and selling every man seeks his own profit only; he makes no reckoning, and does not know, that his neighbor's profit and his own hold together, and that men are always partners in profit one with another. But the insatiable, conscienceless spirit of gain — you would think it lived alone upon this earth — says: let me gain, let me grow rich, let me grow great and enjoy every pleasure of the world; what care I if my fellow is ruined, or lies like poor Lazarus fallen at my gate, craving the crumbs of my table?⁶

But, Tornik, let us leave the portrait of the profit-loving townsfolk and turn back to our village; for my purpose is only to speak of village life and labor, and to show you how sweet is the life of the village people, and how great the fruit of husbandry; for agriculture is the mother of all the crafts of this world, and by it alone the world lives, since man's food and life is bread — not to speak of those manifold other products of the plants, which man by his ingenuity prepares for the needs of our life, so many that they have neither number nor bound; of all which, taken together, I shall give you a brief account in the lessons to come.