Those people who had examined our people for a long time always made a conclusion that there is much evil in our hearts. They say so and say it with deep sorrow. However, there are few such honest and brave people. Mostly, admitting the existence of the disease, they think they are healthy and always call others sick. Everyone, not him, is evil, deceitful, cursing, dishonest and clannish, all that refers to others, not him. However, certainly such people should not be trusted, nor should they be listened to. The truth is that all of us suffer from serious and deep moral diseases.
Look.
Take villagers, farmers, they have grown up together, they have shared food with each other lots of times, but if someone’s field is more fruitful or his cattle breeds, the other gets sick with envy.
Take merchants, they are engaged in trade, although they are not rivals, if one hears about the other’s success, he cannot sleep at night and thinks more how to harm his success rather than of his own business and if he can, he will not spare anything to harm his business.
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Take a clergyman – however much money and respect you pay to him, he is always displeased, he always complains about injustice and you know what that injustice is; it is that his friend also gets it or he also earns his living.
Whether it is a villager or a citizen, they both have an argument. Their argument is not resolved in any court, it lasts for years and they often spend their whole lives and property on that argument, unless they are able to beat the other or they both perish.
There is press. It is experienced with tens of years and numerous events – curse, slander, downright lie, backbiting and deceitfulness. Narrow clannish interest is not so deep in any village, as in this. A famous publicist told me once that workers of their office had explicitly said that one should castigate, mock or silence a certain writer, in a nutshell, try to destroy him at any cost, no matter what a good article he had written, just because he was not with us, he was not a member of the clan.
Join the ranks of national, social and literary figures in that manner. One cannot bear the fame and success of another.
Now let’s take a look at the teachers. They do THAT work more than classes in order to make a pitfall for one another and continuously turning a minor issue, which could have been solved very easily among friends, into a national one, try to label, persecute and morally destroy each other in a formal way, in the court and press for years… no mildness, no forgiveness, no limits for evil.
HOVHANNES TUMANYAN
1910
