"The middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the most progressively prosperous and, in the sum of genius and achievement, perhaps the most solidly great in our annals, have been called the Victorian era... Though all was not well in 1897, yet, in those sixty years past, millions had come out of the house of bondage and misery into which the unregulated advent of the Industrial Revolution had plunged its victims. In the same years our people had spread far over the face of the globe, carrying with them, on the whole, justice, civilisation and prosperity where they went. Great men of genius in literature, science and thought had adorned an age when civilisation seemed for awhile to be strong both in quantity and in quality, and had helped to make common during her reign certain standards of intellectual seriousness and freedom."