Télécharge Epreuve sur un texte anglais et plus Notes au format PDF de Langue Anglaise sur Docsity uniquement! III. Text commentary {16 pts).
Theodore Roosevelt's Inaugural Address (March 4*", 1905).
My fellow-citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be thankful
than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness? in our own
Strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of Good who has blessed us with he
conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of well-being
and of happiness. [...] Under such conditions, it would be our own fault if we
failed; and the success which we have had in the past, the success which we
confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of
vainglory,? but rather a deep realization of all which life has offered us; a full
acknowledgement of the responsibility which is ours; and a fixed determination
to show that, under a free government, a mighty people can thrive‘ best.
We have duties to others and duties to ourselves: and we can shirk°
neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into
relations with the other nations of the earth. [...] Our relations with the other
powers of the world are important; but still more important are our relations
among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and in power as this
nation has seen during the century and a quarter of its national life, is inevitably
accompanied by a similar growth in the problems which are ever before every
nation that rises to greatness. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the
tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the
last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political fabric.” Never
before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of
administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic republic.
Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own
welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. [...]
Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us
differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this
Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems
z ; Boastfulness: /a vantardise.
+ Vainglory: l'orgueil, la vanité.
ira thrive: to be prosperous.
STo shirk: éviter de faire.
SWrought {an ancient form of the preterit and past participle of ‘to work’): provoqué.
7 Fabric (here): du tissu (au sens figuré également).
