Some of you, who we all know are poor and find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were,

gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to carry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form. of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle the masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one, but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of your-self. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him？ His highest duty is to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests？ Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir？ How godlike, how immortal, is he？ See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of him-self, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

The author's purpose in referring to Negro Slavery is to illustrate _________.

A．how frivolous our attitude is toward this very serious social problem

B．that there will always be slavery

C．the foreign origin of Negro Slavery

D．that the worst slave-driver of all is the slave-driver who drives himself