Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

The remark compresses a cyclical view of political freedom: liberty is won through struggle and sacrifice, but prosperity and comfort can dull the vigilance and toughness needed to preserve it. Lawrence’s scornful “poor fools” targets the complacency of the second generation, suggesting that ease breeds forgetfulness—of both the costs of freedom and the habits of self-assertion that sustain it. The final turn—grandchildren returning to slavery—casts history as a repeating pattern of liberation, decadence, and renewed subjection, warning that freedom is not a permanent inheritance but a demanding practice that must be continually renewed.