Four human needs (count them every morning)
Wake body and soul to heed their warning:
Food, that holds back the pangs of our hunger;
Shelter, to protect us from inclement weather;
Safety, from the myriad threats to our lives;
And freedom — for no animal will survive
For long in a cage: though humans, it seems,
Can live contented in prisons and dreams.
For, since Bismarck unified Germany
And Greece from Islam set the Greeks free,
In the USA since the Great Depression,
Since World War Two in France and Britain,
Welfare states our first two needs have assured
But, on condition of providing the third,
Progressively deprived us of the fourth:
For few in the West lack food or warmth,
Yet no man is free (none I’ve ever met);
And to our safety now the greatest threat
Is the State that removes hunger and fear
In exchange for our freedom.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxBut what year
Was that trade made? And who sanctioned its theft?
‘Give me liberty or give me death!’
Said the statesman who expected neither
To face the one nor fight for the other.
Our life is ours to take. And so, for some,
(Upon waking each day) is our freedom.
— March 2026
• • • • •
The title (Ελευθερία ή θάνατος) is Greek for ‘Liberty or Death’, the motto of the Hellenic Republic that was founded in 1822. It was coined by Filiki Eteria (‘The Society of Friends’), a secret political organisation that was formed in 1814 to liberate Greece from 400 years of rule by the Ottoman Empire, and it subsequently became a war-cry during the Greek War of Independence between 1821 and 1832. The five syllables of Eleftheria and the four syllables of i thanatos are said to be represented, respectively, by the five bars azure and four bars argent on the national flag of Greece, which was officially adopted as the first meeting of the Greek National Assembly in 1822.
The phrase itself is as a translation of the French, La liberté ou la mort, which was one of the mottos of the French Revolution. This had appeared in Testament politique de l’Angleterre (1780), an early work by the French journalist, Girondin and Deputy of the Assemblée Nationale, Jacques Pierre Brissot, who was executed by guillotine in 1793. ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ is a phrase attributed, eighteen years after his death, to Patrick Henry, one of the Founding Father of the United States of America, during the speech he delivered to the Second Virginia Convention in 1775. Before that, the lines, ‘It is not now a time to talk of aught / But chains or conquest, liberty or death’, had appeared in Cato: A Tragedy (1712), a play by the English statesman, essayist, dramatist and poet, Joseph Addison. This dramatised the last days of the Roman Senator and Republican, Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, who was known for his honesty and opposition to the dictatorships of first Pompey then Caesar, in the process drawing Rome into civil war. Defeated by Caesar at the Battle of Thapsus, Cato took his own life in 46 BC.
The modern welfare state was progressively introduced by the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in the 1880s following his unification of Germany. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the USA enacted a series of federal programs and financial reforms between 1933 and 1939 that provided some relief from the effects of the Great Depression. Although aspects of a welfare state evolved in Britain in the 1900s, it wasn’t until 1942 that they were codified in the Beveridge Report and then written into Acts of Parliament after the Second World War. And although the French Revolution had introduced relief for the poor and limited medical care, and the Popular Front government of the 1930s had pushed through the Matignon Agreements, France would only create a unified system of welfare for the whole population in 1946. Finally, the Hellenic Republic only began to develop a welfare state after the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1974; but following the sovereign debt crisis of 2008 it has been subjected to the strict policies of fiscal austerity imposed by the Troika formed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As of 2026, 24.3 million people in Britain, more than 1 in 3 residents, claim some form of benefit from the UK State, handing the latter immense power over the population.
Simon Elmer 