Armenians, hindered by persecution from tilling their lands, emigrated
to other countries, where they developed eminent qualities. Industrious
farmers, attached to their native land, they have yet known how, under
necessity, to adapt themselves to all the professions of the modern
world. Thus they came to fill a large place in Constantinople, in
Egypt, in Transylvania, in Poland, and more recently in Baku, in the
whole basin of the Mediterranean, and even in America. Everywhere they
have made useful citizens; it was an Armenian, Althen, who introduced
the cultivation of madder in Southern France. In their own country,
where they had preserved a patriarchal system, most of them remained
farmers.
The Armenian Church, which has not ceased to be autonomous, is the most
democratic of the ancient Christian Churches; it is the only one in
which laymen take part with the priests in the election of the head of
the Church, the Catholicos, who lives in the Convent of Etchmiadzin, in
Russian Armenia.
In the nineteenth century, though possessing no intellectual centre of
their own, the Armenians found means for giving a modern literature to
Russian Armenia and another to Turkish Armenia. Occupying a part of
Asia that is a natural passageway between the Orient and the Occident,
says Professor Meillet, they have been, since the fifth century,
carriers of European civilization. Their vanguard position has made of
them the martyrs of Western culture. Their success and their European
character made them odious to their Turkish masters, who were less
industrious than they. By the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 Turkey pledged
herself to introduce reforms and ameliorations in Armenia, and to
protect these people from attacks by the Kurds and Circassians; but the
pledge was never kept. After the massacres at Sassun in 1894 Europe
made a more imperious demand for reforms; Sultan Abdul Hamid promised
them--and immediately ordered the great massacres of 1895 and 1896,
which won for him the name of the Red Sultan.