Mother of Revolution and Crime is Poverty. Do you agree with this statement?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute questions on that hour
When whirlwind of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings
With those who shaped him to the thing he is
When this dumb Terror will rise to judge this world,
After the silence of the centuries.

The above lines form the last verse of the poem “The Man with the Hoe” by Edwin Markham. In this poem the poet describes a painting by Jean Millet, of a labourer with a bent back, holding a hoe in his hand. The poet says that poverty and economic suppression is clearly visible on his face and then he goes on to ask as to what will happen when this man, who has kept quite for centuries will revolt against those who had subdued him.

Poverty is truly the mother of all crime and revolution. Human Beings have always longed for an economically stable and socially satisfying life. But today the condition of the world is such that economic satisfaction is a far off thing; today, many people are dying of hunger and poor sanitation. According to the World Bank report in 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day.Under such conditions many people are forced to adopt illegal means of earning money; while the rest, after long periods of repression, revolt against the authorities. The French Revolution is the testimony to the above fact. The peasant class in France bach then were forced to pay a lot of taxes, resulting in an economically downtrodden peasant community. After years of suffering from extreme poverty, these people finally revolted against the rich clerics, resulting in the French Revolution, where most of the rich were beheaded on the gullitone. The more recent Jakarta Riots in 1998 also show how a economically supressed community ( the Indonesian Malays in the above case) may revolt against the more economically stable people(the Indonesian Chinese).

Not only this, Global Terrorism, which haunts the world today, is also a product of poverty. Many young men are lured into terrorism when the terrorist organisation which approaches them, gaurantees a good standard of living to their families. Furthermore many smugglers, prostitutes and drug traffickers are forced to take up such professions because of the tough economic conditions faced by them. For example in India, the underworld Don, Chotta Shakeel was a peasant’s son. After years of being financially suppressed, he broke away from poverty by joining many illegal organisations which were involved in smuggling, poaching and drug trafficking. The same person was later involved in the Bombay bomb blasts in 1992 which had taken the lives of many thosands.
This world is not short of examples when it comes to people who have taken up arms to fight poverty.

This is not the end of the story. In the past, wars have been fought to secure a stable living standard. We don’t have to look far into history. The most gory war of all times, World War II was fought because of the economic sanctions imposed on the losers of World War I, especially Germany, by the Treaty of Versailles. As a result of the World War I, Germany was forced to pay a huge war indemnity and many of its economically viable cities were taken away from it. This resulted in huge unemployment and poor economic conditions of the people. Very soon the Big Slump followed in which all the nations were adversely hit, with the most conspicious effect on Germany. With the coming in of Nazi rule, the Government took various measures to increase the economic well being of the people, one of them being territorial expansion. This policy lead to the World War II in which thousands of people were killed and millions rendered homeless. The root cause of all this was the poverty inflicted among the people of Germany after the First World War.

Thus we saw how poverty is truly the mother of all crime and revolutions. The is an urgent need today to address the problem of poverty before we may have more terrorist breeding among us and people preparing for revolt. If no solution is rendered to the problem of poverty, then there may well be a time when the prophesy of Markham may come true and the Man with the Hoe may “stand up to judge this world”.