Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions. Your answer to these questions should be based on passage only.
The last half of my life was spent at one of those painful epochs of human history, during which the world seemed to be getting worse; where past victories which had seemed to be definitive have turned out to be only temporary. When I was young, Victorian optimism was taken for granted. It was thought that freedom and prosperity would spread gradually through the world through an orderly process, and it was hoped that cruelty, tyranny, and injustice would continually diminish. Hardly anyone was hunted by the fear of great wars. Hardly any-one thought of the nineteenth century as a brief interlude between past and future barbarism.