In the Armenians we have a people who are peculiarly adapted to be the intermediaries of the new dispensation. They profess our religion, are familiar with some of our best ideals, and assimilate each new product of European culture with an avidity and thoroughness which no other race between India and the Mediterranean has given any evidence of being able to rival. These capacities they have made manifest under the greatest of disadvantages—as a subject race ministering to the needs of Mussulman masters. They know well that with every advance of true civilisation they are sure to rise, as they will certainly fall at each relapse.
For nearly a thousand years they have been held in subjection; and it would be folly to expect that they should not have suffered in character by the menial pursuits which they have been constrained to follow. They have been rayas, exploited by races most often their inferiors in intellect; and I need not enlarge upon the results which have followed from such a condition. One should rather wonder that their defects are not more pronounced.
On the other hand, they are possessed of virtues with which they are seldom credited. The fact that in Turkey they are rigorously precluded from bearing arms has disposed superficial observers to regard them as cowards. A different judgment might be meted out were they placed on an equality in this respect with their enemies the Kurds. At all events, when given the chance, they have not been slow to display martial qualities both in the domain of the highest strategy and in that of personal prowess. The victorious commander-in-chief for Russia in her Asiatic campaign of 1877 was an Armenian from the district of Lori—Loris Melikoff. In the same campaign the most brilliant general of division in the Russian army was an Armenian—Tergukasoff.[8] The gallant young staff-officer, Tarnaieff, who planned and led the hair-brained attack on the Azizi fort in front of Erzerum, was an Armenian, and paid for his daring with his life. At the present day the frontier police, engaged in controlling the Kurds of the border, are recruited from among Armenians. These examples may be sufficient to nail to the counter an inveterate lie, from which the Armenians have suffered, at least in British estimation, more, perhaps, than from any other supposed defect.
If I were asked what characteristics distinguish the Armenians from other Orientals, I should be disposed to lay most stress on a quality known in popular speech as grit. It is this quality to which they owe their preservation as a people, and they are not surpassed in this respect by any European nation. Their intellectual capacities are supported by a solid foundation of character, and, unlike the Greeks, but like the Germans, their nature is averse to superficial methods; they become absorbed in their tasks and plumb them deep. There is no race in the Nearer East more quick of learning than the Persians; yet should you be visited by a Persian gentleman accompanied by his Armenian man of business, take a book down from your shelves, better one with illustrations, and, the conversation turning upon some subject treated by its author, hand it to them after a passing reference. The Persian will look at the pictures, which he may praise. The Armenian will devour the book, and at each pause in the conversation you will see him poring over it with knitted brows. These tendencies are naturally accompanied by forethought and balance; and they have given the Armenian his pre-eminence in commercial affairs. He is not less clever than the Greek; but he sees further, and, although ingrained with the petty vices of all Oriental traders, the Armenian merchant is quick to appreciate the advantages of fair dealing when they are suggested by the conditions under which his vocation is pursued. A friend with a large experience of the Balkans, with their heterogeneous urban populations, has told me, as an interesting fact, that in the statistics of bankruptcy for those countries the proportion of Armenians implicated is comparatively low. Inasmuch as such bankruptcies are usually more or less of a fraudulent nature, the fact indicates not, perhaps, so much the greater integrity of Armenians, as their power to resist an immediate temptation and their promptitude in recognising the monetary value of commercial stability.
But in order to estimate this people at anything like their true worth, one should study them not in the Levant, with its widespread corruption, but in the Russian provinces of Armenia. Here they have most successfully utilised the interval between the period when the sword of Russia was the sword of the deliverer and that present-day period when the principles which inspire her rulers are those of Pan-orthodoxy and Panslavism. I was so much surprised by the results achieved, and by the contrast which was offered between the sterling progress of this newly-emancipated population and the stagnation and progressive relapse of their neighbours of different nationality, spread over the whole wide area of the Nearer Asia, that, without any certain previous purpose, I resolved to pursue the study further and to protract the journey into Turkish territory. For what was it that I saw? In every trade and in every profession, in business and in the Government services the Armenian was without a rival and in full possession of the field. He equips the postal service by which you travel, and if you are so fortunate as to find an inn the landlord will be an Armenian. Most of the villages in which you sojourn are inhabited by a brawny Armenian peasantry. In the towns, if the local governor attaches to your service the head of the local police, it will be a stalwart Armenian in Russian uniform who will find you either a lodging or a shady garden in which to erect your tents. If you remark on the way some well-built edifice which aspires to architectural design, it will be the work of an Armenian builder from Alexandropol. In that city itself, where the Armenians are most numerous, the love of building, which was so marked a characteristic of their forefathers, has blossomed again among kinder circumstances; a spacious cathedral and several large churches stand among new stone houses fronted with ambitious façades. In Erivan each richer merchant has lodged himself in an agreeable villa, of which the Italian architecture rises from the shade of poplars and willows and fruit trees laden with fruit. The excellent wine which is found in Erivan is made according to the newest methods by an Armenian who has studied for two years in Germany the most modern appliances of the industry in Europe. The monetary transactions of the country are in the hands of Armenian bankers. The skilled workmen—jewellers, watchmakers, carpenters—are Armenians. Even the ill-miened officer of mounted frontier police, whose long association with the wilder elements—Kurds and robbers of small and large degree—has lent him the appearance of a chief of brigands, will bear, not much to its honour, an Armenian name. The large majority of the people do not speak Russian, or speak it very imperfectly. Indeed, were it not for the fact that the governors and chief police officials of large districts are Russians, and that Cossacks and Russian regular soldiers may here and there be seen, the traveller would not suspect that he was in a Russian province, and would go the way he listed with the most serene composure until he was rudely awakened by some abrupt collision with the Russian system and brought to his proper mind. As it is, the Armenian has edged out the Russian, and, if Peace were allowed her conquests unhindered, he would ultimately rule in the land.
Such a situation is suggestive; nor can we feel surprise if the Armenian has exercised his Oriental imagination upon it in a manner less prudent than may be calculated to appeal to the slower veined races of the West. The idea of a modern Armenian kingdom has set the spark to that national enthusiasm which the perusal of his historical records has fed. The example of Eastern Europe has seemed to justify his speculations. When I come to deal with the Turkish provinces, I shall endeavour to show the falseness of such premisses; but I do not believe that any such details have influenced his somewhat more general conceptions, and they are not pertinent here. The vision of an independent Armenian state, could it be realised in a remote future, will not appeal to all minds alike. Many will see a real danger to human progress in the creation of these small states. The national sentiment they would place among those realised ideals upon which, as our civilisation widens, it is necessary to build anew. The magnitude of the conflict, should any of the greater nations enter the arena of war, acts as a wholesome preventive to ambitions which the small state is prone to indulge on the least pretence. The gratification of such ambitions causes bad administration and ends in bankruptcy, while few of the advantages which are offered by a great empire can the people of a little country enjoy. Such considerations have great weight, and it would probably be well if, whenever it were practicable, our political actions were founded upon them; yet they scarcely indicate a solution in the present case. The Armenian, who is a convert to such views, might justly ask in what quarter he should look. The Turkish Empire will not even protect him, and massacres its Armenian subjects; while, should he turn his eyes to Russia, he sees no prospects of material advantage which would enable him to rise above the economic stage to which he has already attained, and surrender to Russian ideals could only be effected in his opinion at the price of moral and intellectual annihilation. Confronted with such an outlook, he seeks refuge within himself; and, should he consult his more sober perceptions, he will labour in silence and without ostentation to supply the requirements which his race still needs; to raise the peasant from his present degradation, to purify the Church, to promote the interest of his richer neighbours in work for the common good. These are the more legitimate ambitions which, however tedious, are certain of success, and which will establish, whatever be the revolution of politics, his right to influence the history of his country as one of the only stable native elements of progress in the Nearer East.
If, before concluding these reflections, we turn to the broader issues upon which such questions bear, and, having examined the comparative failure of Russia in Armenia, consider its significance to the larger world, we may find that the very strength of the Russian system as a powerful factor in international life derives from the self-same character which has denied her victory here. Had Russia through a natural process of attraction been able to draw towards her the higher races who stood on her path, she would have been a greater nation, but perhaps a less formidable force. Round her she groups the less cultivated peoples—the nomads of Asia, the wanderers of the steppe—and arms them with the might of a European organisation which the intellect of Europe, impressed into her service, perfects as a weapon for her use. The dangers which such results threaten can only imperil the improvident and those whose nervous powers are unstrung; but the world has not yet advanced sufficiently to render those dangers unreal. The indolence of mind which shrinks from facing difficulties and leaves them to solve themselves is not the least element of weakness in her European neighbours by which Russia profits and through which she grows; but the victory will now as always be given to those states which unite with a higher civilisation a spirit of enterprise still healthy and powers still unimpaired.
END OF VOL. I
[1] The Statistics of 1886 underestimate the population of Tiflis town. I have corrected them on the assumption that the population of the city in 1886 was 145,731. See the Caucasus Calendar for 1893, p. 20. [↑]