Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
President Clinton's Inaugural Address this month is the 53 rd in the series that began in 1789. All are worth a read--not just the highlights, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. They will give you a feeling of being there, not as an omniscient historian of 1997 looking back at 1837 or 1897 but as an ordinary citizen who shares--and is limited by--the information, the concerns, and the values of those times. (Thanks to Columbia University, all the addresses can be found on the Web.) Among all the past presidents and their speech writers there was only one literary genius: Lincoln. After 132 years, his second inaugural still brings tears to your eyes and chills your blood. None of the other inaugural addresses are in that league. But by and large they are dignified and intelligent speeches given by articulate men, each in touch with his times and aware that his inauguration was the most solemn occasion of his life. The stance and style of the inaugurals seem to have gone through three phases. The first, lasting until Lincoln, was that of the modest, classic public servant. The second, lasting through William Howard Taft, was of the prosaic government executive. The third, in which we are still, is the phase of the assertive, theatrical leader-preacher. This classification is not waterproof. Theodore Roosevelt may belong in the third phase and Warren G. Harding-Calvin Coolidge-Herbert Hoover in the second. But the trend is clear. None of his successors has made the point as forcefully as that. But echoes are to be found in almost every president for the next 68 years. (John Adams was an exception. He was apparently so envious of Washington that he spent a large part of his address spelling out his own excellent qualifications for the job.) That era ended with Lincoln. Subsequent inaugurals routinely contain protestations of humility, but they are perfunctory and do not sound sincere. The antebellum modesty, while in part a reflection of the conventional etiquette of the time, may also have served a political objective: to alleviate the concerns of those who--in the early days of the republic--feared it might be transformed into a monarchy, and the president into a king. A little later, perhaps after 1820, a new worry arose. Would the power of the federal government be used to interfere with the "peculiar domestic institution" of the Southern states? The presidents' assurance of the limitation of their powers may have been intended to give comfort to those states. Lincoln faced a different situation. With the South already seceding, he could only "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" by asserting the power of the federal government and his own power as chief executive. It was no time for modesty. Lincoln's successors inherited a federal government with much more authority--and more need to use it--than before the war, and they had less motivation to belittle themselves and their powers. The change in literary style from classical to colloquial can be demonstrated by one statistic. In all the inaugurals from Washington through James Buchanan, the average number of words per sentence was 44. From Lincoln to Wilson it was 34, and since Wilson it has been 25. I do not consider this a deterioration (this article has an average of 17 words per sentence), but it does reflect the change in the size and character of the audience and in the means of communication. William Henry Harrison could talk about the governments of Athens, Rome, and the Helvetic Confederacy and expect his audience to know what he was talking about. That wouldn't be true today. But Harrison's audience would not have known what the Internet was. Presidents and their speech writers have mined their predecessors for memorable words and repeated them without attribution. Kennedy's trumpet call, "Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country," has an ironic history. In his inaugural, Harding, surely no model for Kennedy, had said, "Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too little of government, and at the same time do for it too little." And even before he became president, in a speech in 1916, Harding had said, "In the great fulfillment we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation." One subject that does get ample treatment is taxes. "Taxes," or some equivalent word, appears in 43 of the 52 inaugural addresses to date. Coolidge said in 1925: "The time is arriving when we can have further tax reduction. ... I am opposed to extremely high rates, because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the country, and, finally, because they are wrong." Federal taxes were then about 3 percent of the gross domestic product. Ronald Reagan said essentially the same thing in 1981, when they were 20 percent. The most disturbing aspect of the whole series of inaugurals is what is said and unsaid on the subject of race relations, which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls "the supreme American problem." The words "black," "blacks," "Negro," or "race" (as applied to blacks) do not appear at all until Rutherford Hayes, 1877. James Monroe asked in 1817, "On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?" These were rhetorical questions, intended to get the answer "No one!"--as if there were not millions of slaves in America. Before the Civil War the word "slavery" appears only in the Inaugural Address of Martin Van Buren, 1837, and Buchanan, 1857, and then only as something that, pursuant to the Constitution and in order to preserve the Union, should not be interfered with. But although generally unmentionable, the subject was boiling, and would boil over in 1861. After the Civil War, it is in the inaugurals of Hayes, James Garfield (1881), and Benjamin Harrison (1889) that we find the most explicit and positive discussion of the need to convert into reality the rights and freedom granted to the "freedmen" on paper by the 13 th , 14 th , and 15 th amendments. Garfield's was the strongest among these. (He had been a student at Williams College in the 1850s, 80 years before me, when the college had been a station on the underground railway.) But the subject then began to fade. William McKinley said in his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1897, "Lynchings must not be tolerated in a great and civilized country like the United States," but he said it without horror. Taft raised the subject of race relations in 1909 only to express satisfaction at the progress that had been made. And then the subject disappeared. FDR never mentioned it in any of his four inaugurals. POSTSCRIPT: To read Herbert Stein's analysis of President Clinton's second Inaugural Address, click .

<question>:
How do the most recent speeches that were analyzed compare to the earlier speeches?

<options>:
A They are getting longer overall, but with less substance
B They contain less jargon than prior years
C They contain shorter sentences and try to unite people
D They are generally becoming more humble as time goes on

<answer>:

C