Dear Tornik, you see it every day, so you can easily grasp what exchange means in our life of giving and taking. No man can meet his needs by his own labor alone, because human society lives by working together. What we have, we give. What we do not have, we take. We have many things the townsman does not have, and the townsman, just the same, has many things we do not.
Take wheat, for example, and all the other things we grow, grain and pulse and garden crops. We have sheep and cattle, milk, cheese, butter, and many other fruits of farming besides. By selling what is left over, we buy the things we need, and they are few, because the wants of village life are simpler and plainer. For our clothes, shal wool and linen are enough. For the household, Van calico, red linen and the local manisa used to be enough, though nowadays even Europe's shoddy printed basmas1 and broadcloths are not considered enough.
Ah, Tornik, the times have changed. Village families have developed a taste for things, just like the townsfolk. The glittering finery of town households is a real temptation to our plain-living families. But village people must do everything they can to hold on to their plainness and their frugal way of life, because a villager has to live within his station. I will come back to this in a lesson of its own.
Apart from clothing, what a villager most needs for his work are the iron tools, which the town craftsman makes and we buy with money. The share of our gutan,2 the scythe and the sickle for mowing, and the other important iron things we cannot do without, all of these the blacksmith gets ready for us.
Go ahead and ask me straight out, Tornik. Couldn't the villager see to all his own needs himself? Good for you, Tornik, long life to you! That is a very shrewd question. What you want is a villager who never has to depend on the townsman. Yes, it looks easy enough. Just let the villager learn to read and write the way the townsfolk do, let his mind open, let him learn to think and move forward in his own measure. Then he will work it out for himself. He will place a few quick-witted boys as apprentices with the town blacksmith. In a short time they learn the trade well, come back to the village, open a smithy, and make the tools that are needed, and not just for their own village but for the villages around it too. But leave that aside. We can make our plain clothing too, since the villager has wool and cotton. It is true that our Van country does not succeed at growing cotton, but Mush, Yerznka, Kharberd and many other provinces have done fairly well with it. And cotton will not run short for the villagers of Van either. It comes in great quantity from the nearby Persian border, and a man of Van can buy it, spin it and weave cloth from it. Better still, though, the villager can make his own clothes by weaving shal stuffs from his own wool. In winter especially, when the field work stops, he can weave shal and keep busy with the other crafts that are important and useful to village people.
It hurts me deeply, Tornik, that our villagers of Van and of Mush lead such an idle, workless life, above all in the villages around the city. Their men go into town in droves, hang around the wine-houses for days at a time, and turn into drunkards and sots. I am not saying the working villager should be denied that pleasure, when the townsman takes far more of it. And do you know how much wine there is? The vineyards of all Van and of the villages around it yield close to two hundred thousand litras3 of wine, and the merry, wine-loving people of Van drink every bit of it. And what else are they going to do but drink it? By the next year it has turned to vinegar. The vine-keepers do not know the craft of wine-making, and even if they did, it would still come to nothing, because they cannot turn the wine to profit. They have no way to carry it anywhere. The sea is far away, and the roads are rough and unbuilt. By the provident care of the state, roads have been built and leveled from city to city in many provinces of Turkey, and the trade of those provinces grows day by day. We hope our provinces will have the same good fortune. Then not just the wine but the fruits of the land as well may be carried down to the harbor of Trebizond.4
There, dear Tornik, in answering your question the talk ran on and carried me into other things. But let me come back to your question and explain a necessary law of the world's economy, the law that binds human society together through trade and mutual gain. What you want is for the villager to meet all his needs by his own labor and never have to buy anything from the townsfolk.
Ah, Tornik, this is where you go wrong. That idea is nothing but a child's wish, and it goes against the whole of human society, against its moral union and its common interest. You need to understand this. Human society lives by each part depending on the other. What one lacks, the other supplies, and everything in this world runs on exchange. How do you picture it? You carry your wheat to town, sell it, and head home without buying a single thing at the market? Only sell, and never buy? A trade like that is deeply wrong and unjust. At a single stroke it would rob the merchants and the craftsmen both, and shut the door on their livelihood. Just as you live by selling wheat and the other fruits of your farming, the merchant lives by selling his goods. Most of a province's people are villagers. If the villager cuts off his trade with the city, can the city's people live? And can the village people live if they do not sell what they grow to the townsfolk, or, when they are hard pressed, turn to a friend in town for a loan? Who doesn't know that the villager's treasury is the city? The poor villager, even with the whole crop of his farming, still cannot cover his needs and his debts and pay the state's taxes when they come due. So he is always driven to go to the moneyed townsman and ask for a loan.
I will come back to this, Tornik, and you must take it in and be convinced of it. The city lives by the village and the village by the city. That is an established law of the world's economy, and whole nations and peoples are governed by it.
Notes
- Manisa was a striped cotton cloth named for the town of Manisa in Asia Minor, and basma was cheap printed calico. These were the everyday cloths of the bazaar. ↩
- The gutan is the great wooden ox-plow of the Armenian highlands, drawn by teams of buffalo and oxen. ↩
- The litra is an old measure of weight and capacity used in the Van country. ↩
- Trebizond (Trabzon) was the Black Sea port through which the trade of the Armenian provinces passed toward Constantinople and Europe. ↩