The Bettering of the Village People's Condition

A man falls into despair, Tornik, when he looks upon the condition of the village people and the bitter-toiling life it leads; reasoning with himself he says: is it possible, then, that the lot of our plain-dwelling, earth-working people should change, that its life should mend, and that it too should begin, step by step, to go forward?

You must know, Tornik, that the condition of the nations and peoples of this world does not change of a sudden, but comes about by natural order and by degrees. Progress began from the west; it has but newly entered the eastern door; much time is needed before, coming in at that door, it arrive and reach our own land. Progress begins first from the cities, and then draws near the villages. But the cities have only now begun their A-B-C: all the primary schools stand open for tender children, who are still learning to read and write — a little, too, of Christian lessons, a little of reckoning, and a little of looking at the map of geography; the child, not yet knowing the places round about him, off he goes — arriving at the capitals of America and of China!

In the chief villages of Vaspurakan a beginning has already been made of opening primary schools; little by little the village children have begun to learn reading and writing. The village schools can keep their terms only in winter; for in summer the villager's ten-year-old child is very needful to him. Who is to graze the foals and the lambs? Let those little boys do the plow-boy's work; in all the businesses of husbandry, from spring to autumn, the service such a boy renders is equal to four hundred dahekans of wages. Progress in our land is a babe new-born; much and much time is yet needed for it to be baptized in the font of the school's enlightenment, to grow day by day, and to become a man. Do not think, Tornik, that the child of education grows up as fast as the son a mother bears: for the growth of the natural birth twenty years suffice, but the growth of progress and education has need of long centuries. And do you know how many centuries ago Europe began — and today she has scarcely reached this degree?

Yet for the generation of our time it is a great fortune; for Europe with grinding labor and with sacrifices great upon great leveled and opened that road of progress, and made ready all the elements of learning and science, setting them like a table before us. The word of the Gospel fits this fortune well: "Other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors."¹

Will you not say then, Tornik: what need have we any more of labor and toil? Let us sit down at that ready-laid table and taste.

That is a very false judgment. Did you suppose that table is the tanapur and dinner our mistress of the house has cooked, that we should take spoon and sit and eat? No: much striving, much toil, much watching and much travail are needed before we can eat the bread of the table Europe has made ready; for that bread is tilled in the school's field. What do you say, Tornik — shall we not plow, not sow, not tend, not reap, not thresh, not grind our wheat, not knead our flour, not fire the tonir, not bake the bread — and without all that sweat-pouring labor sit down so easily and at our rest, and eat bread? You have heard from the Gospel that the sparrows are fed without plowing or toiling.² Eh, simpleton Tornik! have you never observed the sparrow's own labor? Has that puny little bird no travail after its own measure? Do you not see how, to keep its brood alive, it goes and comes a thousand times, fetching straws to build its nest; it lays its eggs, hatches out its young, goes and comes without ceasing, finding little worms and bringing them to the nestlings till their little wings be grown; and see then how hard it labors to give its young their schooling, that they may learn to fly!

Do you see, Tornik — there is nothing in nature that does not labor: bird, beast, creeping thing, whatever lives and moves, labors to keep its life. Leave the creatures of the dry land: the fish of the sea and the myriad kinds of swimming creatures in that sea-world labor and strive likewise to keep their lives.

The speechless creatures of the universe learned once for all from nature: God the Creator sent them out of the school of His creation so made, that those unreasoning creatures can find their food and live without learning and without schooling.

But man, who was created a reasoning creature and rules over all the creatures — he, without school and without education, cannot furnish out his bread. True, the people of our land, in its greatest part ignorant and unlearned, does procure its daily provision in bitter and toilsome fashion, and eats its bread in suffering and hardship; but it is by no means possible that it should have even some small well-being of life; that it should know the husbandry of its own life, how to govern house and family in rule and order; know the things of the world and the terms of men's living together; know in mastery the good and the bad, the good and the evil, virtue and vice; know with certainty how to tell apart truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, honor and dishonor. And what is greatest — to know also the Christian religion it professes, the supreme commandments of holy Scripture and the Gospel: what a Christian's duties are toward God, toward his fellows and toward his household, toward the church, toward the nation, toward the state. All these most needful proficiencies the school's training-house teaches us. Therefore, for the changing of the village people's present condition, the first and fundamental term is school and education. But say now, Tornik: to found a school a man is needed, and with the man, money. Where is the man, where the money, and where the schoolmaster to train them — out of the threshing-floor, or out of the winepress?³ The village people's case is plain enough already: it has no mind to think with, nor can it so much as understand the word education. And if you say, let the townsman help — since it is by the grace of the village-dwelling people that all his trade and profit is — yes, the townsman: not only is he unable to lend a hand materially and aid the laboring people's education, but morally too his spirit is cold and indifferent, even toward the education of his own children. Here is an example close by us — the renowned city of Van. Ask how great a sum the Vanetsi spends in the year upon his schools. Of that I will not speak; I spare him. Only this much I will say: the Vanetsi for the most part educates his boys and girls with the meager candle-money and oil-money vowed to the church; he is not used to paying a fee for schooling; ask it of him, and he scowls; press him, and he takes the boy out of school.

But Tornik, we have no need of the townsfolk's help. Long stand the village people! It pays the state its dues; it provides for all those coming-and-going guests: can it not keep one plain schoolmaster, who will be content with very little pay?

We have bread, we have butter, we have cheese and other milk-meats; our schoolmasters are men of few wants — they will be content even with zhazhik. Only there must be some author of care and order, to exhort the common people and lead it toward the road of education. And whose is that noble duty? First the diocesan Prelate's, and second the monastery vardapets'.

But alas, Tornik, our present Prelates, you might say, are become mere political functionaries: the proper ministry of the church — school, education, learning and the rest — is left lying at the pillow's foot. And for this thing who is to blame, the people or the Prelate? We judge thus: the Prelate is to blame; for he is a shepherd, a minister of the Gospel, and simply a spiritual servant of Christ's church.

But see how the people has made its Prelate's spiritual office a thing of the flesh. It does not require of the Prelate that he open its closed eyes by miracle, that it may see what things there are in the world; nor that he heal its soul's diseases. One miracle only it asks: that the Prelate, like Jesus, bless the five loaves and feed five thousand men.⁴ And thus the hungry people's question of bread has overmastered God's word of life, whose preacher and steward the Prelate is. How lamentable, Tornik, is the people's unknowing state — whereby it would seem the people is more to blame than the Prelate. Yet who can judge it, when the people, choked with the questions of its daily life and hemmed in with want, hopes for every remedy from the Prelate? Yes — hope it must, so long as the people is ignorant: it has no learning, it cannot speak, it does not know the law of the land; of course it knows the Prelate for the mediator and advocate of its cause.

So then, Tornik, the matter falls again upon the monastery vardapets, who have a free condition. Great is their obligation, and they stand in debt of gratitude, to labor for the village people with all self-devotion: to visit from village to village, preach, teach, speak in a plain and homely style, so that the people understand, and be able to grasp the meaning of the school and the education of children.

In this way a visiting vardapet will not only succeed in founding village schools; he will succeed also in educating the village youths, men of grown age, yes and the worn old men themselves — whose schoolhouse is the church. If the vardapet comes often on his visitation; if he speaks, repeats his sermons and the thoughts of the Gospel that has been read; if he explains, shows forth God's commandments — so making ready the table of the word and bread of life, and setting it before the hungry people, that it may eat and be filled.

The village people, though in the Christian life it is very old, yet if you look upon its present life, it is become a new-born suckling babe, and the image of its life is ignorance and rusticity. Its teeth are not yet grown, and solid meats are not for it — that is, fine lessons and sermons; for it there must be only the nourishment of milk, that it may taste with sweetness and digest. True it is that the learning of childhood is most grounded and firm. Would that I too had had the fortune to enter school at a child's age and receive an ordered education! What I know, and what I speak to you in these lessons, I have learned from full-grown age onward — and slight things they are; for only by hearing, and by reading books, have I become in some small measure versed in the things of the world. You know, Tornik, every book is a schoolmaster apiece to him who reads: the writers have died and gone, the writing has stayed alive. There are books that are immortal: let thousands and thousands of years pass, they will speak with us still.

Writing these few lines, I would have you understand, Tornik, that men grown in years can also learn their needful lessons, in some good measure, and be educated — only let the teacher of them be a self-devoted man, unwearying, ever-speaking, undespairing, persevering and long-suffering. The trial and proof of this I saw with my own eyes; let me tell you of it, Tornik.

Some twenty and five years since, under the shadow of the church of Surb Lusavorich of Galata in Bolis,⁵ there was made a new-fashioned undertaking of education. The author who began that thing was a worthy, unwearied, labor-loving man, Ghazaros Kristostur by name. Alas, he died two years ago; but his undertaking he carried on unbroken even to the grave. And what was his undertaking? — to open a Sunday hearing-room, for the education of the pandukht porters. Yes: he opened it, and he prospered. You should have seen, on Sundays and feast-days, how our pandukht brothers, forsaking the coffee-house and the other places of amusement, poured into the hearing-room; and Mister Kristostur, schoolmaster without salary, beginning from the letter Ayb, gave out his plain lessons. He was no trained pedagogue; but he taught the lessons in a style and manner so easy, that those porters, reputed thick of wit, grasped his sayings with all readiness. And behold, in a little round of time our porters, rough peasants, became men of knowledge. They learned a fair measure of the Armenian tongue, Grammar, the history of holy Scripture, Christian doctrine and Gospel lessons, Arithmetic, calendar reckonings and the rest.

Do you know, Tornik, what was the end of this fruitful undertaking? When the porter man had got the taste of learning, and his mind was some little opened, he felt and knew his own worth; he learned that man is not a beast of burden — God created man a prince, to be the ruler of the beasts. So the porter cast the pack-saddle (the semer) off his calloused back, and went and set himself to work according to his worth. Those porters took even particular clerks' places; and some of them, returning to their native land, became schoolmasters in the village schools.

I am bound in gratitude to remember and confess that in my time in Bolis I went continually to listen to that self-devoted man; above all his admonitory and moral lessons were most schooling and profitable for the pandukhts of the provinces. The departed soul was a preaching vardapet without cowl or crozier. He knew nothing of method, nor how to use an orator's tongue, nor how to say a thing briefly and glancingly and pass on: no — he would speak so long, he would plow the fallow-grown ground of his porter pupils so long, till he had loosened their minds, and sown and bedded in the seed-grains of his lessons. Blessed be his memory, and the Lord God render that unwearied laborer his wage!

This true history I have told you for a proof, Tornik, that you and the village people may be persuaded that men of full age can also be educated, can also learn — only let there be a self-devoting teacher; above all when he teaches and withal works, and offers his own person as a pattern to the people.

And where are those persons? How rare they are for the peasant people! And whence should they suddenly arise? Shall they come from the desert, like John the Baptist?⁶ Or shall the Lord God, caring for His people, bring forth a prophet from among the shepherds, out of the school of His grace, as He once did for the people of Israel?⁷ So long as we have no established, well-ordered training-schools from which learned and educated inheritors may come up, thus will the people's condition remain.

The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few, says Jesus. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest.⁸ We neither pray nor ask; yet the Lord God of Himself, pitying our wretchedness, sometimes brings forth a little laborer, a visiting shepherd, for our harvests — such as Der Daniel vardapet, brother of the monastery of Varag, who for ten years and more shepherded with all self-devotion not only our village of Archak but all the near and far villages round about. His visiting feet knew no rest; he went about without ceasing. That unwearied laborer not only sowed the seeds of the Gospel and spoke moral counsels, but gave out lessons of village husbandry besides — in a style so plain, clear and understandable that we thick-witted peasants could grasp the whole of his words. He built and established our school of Archak, and withal ordered revenues for its continuance; likewise in many other villages he built churches and founded schools. Daniel vardapet's life was altogether plain and of few wants: he fed from the peasant's table, which commonly was tanapur and madzun; he ate without murmuring and would say, For a religious, this much is enough and to spare. His spirit was without love of possessions, and free of the disease of avarice. He had bowels of pity; he yearned over the wretched; he loved better to give than to receive. He had a steadfast will: whatever he set his hand to begin, he labored with unflagging spirit to carry forward. He was loosed from the bond of prejudice; and though he had not so very much learning nor a widely developed mind, he was most apt to the progress of the times. In a word, Daniel vardapet was the one visiting shepherd the village people had; for this the people loved him, and he himself loved the village people more.

Would that such self-devoted laborers of the church were multiplied for our plenteous harvests! You should see then, Tornik, how the village people's condition would change and mend.

Ending these general lessons, the time is come that I should speak and make known to you that thing which touches your own life apart, and our family line.