In spite of the dreadful roads, and the lack of protection for travelers, the Armenians manage to send a good deal of grown or manufactured stuff to the ports on the Black and Caspian seas,--Trebizond, Batoum, Poti, Baku,--silk and cotton, and fabrics made from them; hides and leather, including lambskins; wine, dried fruits, raisins, tobacco, drugs, and dyestuffs, wax, and other things.
Methods of cultivation are probably much like what they were in Abraham's time; there are no very modern machines or even tools. The plough is not quite the mere scratching-stick of the savages, to be sure; but it is only a crooked piece of wood with a bit of iron fastened to the end that touches the ground, drawn by oxen and held by the farmer. The fields of grain are reaped by the sickle as of old; it takes as long to cut down one acre so as fifty by a common mowing machine. The sheaves are carried to a gal or threshing floor near the house, an open platform, not sheltered from the weather; and there the grain is separated from the straw by a process so curious that I doubt if any American, save a missionary to Armenia, has ever heard of it. It is not treading it out under the feet of the cattle, as pictured in the Bible, nor beating it out with a flail; both these methods kept the straw whole. A threshing board is made by fastening hundreds of sharp flints into a wooden frame; the grain is placed between this and the threshing floor, the oxen attached to the board, and the farmer sitting on it drives them round and round in a circle until the straw is cut fine, and the grain well rubbed and shaken loose. Then, on the first windy day, he takes the old hand fan or winnow, and separates the grain from the straw, keeping the latter to feed the animals in winter; for the long grass of American plateaus, and the barns of hay from them, are seldom seen in Armenia.
The wheat crops are extraordinary; not only great in yield, but the grains often double the size of ordinary American wheat, as compared with specimens from the large and representative fields of Minnesota and Nebraska.
But when this wheat is threshed out, the farmer cannot shovel it up and grind, or sell, or put it into bins; no indeed! He cannot take up a quart of it without permission from the government; for the government claims one-eighth of it as a tax,--it was always a "tithe" or tenth from the oldest historic times down to the present Sultan, but he raised the percentage to an eighth,--and it must stay on that exposed threshing floor, in rain or winds, or any sort of weather, till the tax-gatherer comes and measures it, which may be a week, or two weeks, or a month, and will be forever unless he is bribed to come. Nor is even this double tax all; the tax-gatherer is a tax farmer,--that is, he pays a lump sum to the government for the taxes of a district, and all he can get above that is so much profit to him; so if the grain on a threshing floor actually measures ten bushels, say, he will write it fifteen. After the farmer has paid first the tax on the land to the government direct, then the double, or rather treble, tax to the gatherer on the crops, more than half the income he can get from the land has gone to the government. I do not know an Armenian farmer who is not in debt; they work hard, but the products of their labor go to the government and the Kurds, and any one who complains is considered a revolutionist, and imprisoned or killed. The simple unvarnished truth is that an Armenian Christian has no rights of life or property whatever; and all he keeps of either (not very much) is what the regularly appointed officials or the self-appointed Kurdish fleecers choose to leave him.