Welcome to the third installment of our brand new Tale for Our Time, a most far-sighted novel, written by Robert Hugh Benson and published in 1907. You can enjoy Lord of the World episode by episode, night by night, twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. Or, alternatively, do feel free to binge-listen: you can find the earlier installments here. As Steve, a Manhattan member of The Mark Steyn Club, enthuses:
I have never read this book, and Mark's reading is brilliant. Truly a Tale for Our Time.
I guess some ambiguity is sensible when giving a 'history' of the next 100 years. I took the reference to '6%' as what you—the one not working for the government—got to keep, not what you had to pay.
Not necessarily. It was the Great War that accustomed freeborn citizens to giving government a substantial double-digit percentage of their income as a matter of routine. And Mr Benson was writing seven years before the war. When Sir Robert Peel had introduced (non-wartime non-temporary) income tax in the 1840s, the rate was set at sevenpence in the pound - or 2.9 per cent. So Benson's proposed rate would have more than doubled it - and that still had the capacity to shock in 1907.
In tonight's episode, we get a glimpse of some other twenty-first-century innovations:
It was thirty years now since the practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to both foot and eye...
Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the table.
Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.
Alas, as is the way in much of the modern world, aesthetic pleasingness has not kept up with the marvels of the delivery system:
Old Mrs Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little depressed this morning. The entrée was not very successful, she thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.
Let us hope the "admirable imitation" is more admirable than what Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are planning for our cuisine.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Episode Three simply by clicking here and logging-in.
Alison Castellina, an English Steyn Clubber, has her own take on Mr Benson's account of the last century:
Fabulous, very prophetic and a 'light' introduction. Pope Francis, who seems to have been in an alliance of sorts with Biden and the globalists, was wrong, yet again, as the intro is not 'heavy'.
I have been impressed at the strength and outspoken courage of Catholics during the pandemic, but its establishment and traditionalist teaching is 'not enough', which is recognised by Benson through its steady weakening by a) failed materialism and then b) (more successful) psychology A second German attack on the authority of Scripture in the 30s, was more like in 'the 50s'.
The mention of the alliance of religious refugees from the atheist, Marxist established churches to the failing free churches is prescient; also the failure of art in the attempt to keep the spirit alive, via art, then over taxed (at 6%?), forcing the return of the free-minded to Government employment (the hotbed of socialists); the (re)nationalisatjon of the railways; the usurpation of Oxford and Cambridge; their former academics ending in 'the poor house' (the state pension only began in 1916) so that scholarship must be revived all over again; the fall of the House of Lords and the monarchy; huge inheritance taxes.
What is missing is the suppression of information/censorship (and TV). Benson (half) rightly envisages that the dumbed down people, scared to be patriotic, will accept these things like the frog being boiled alive. The Eastern religion seems to be Japan, not Islam.
I loved the underground bunker under the Embankment (which actually houses the Underground and vast sewers) kept at a steady temperature of 18C (Benson invented air conditioning!). That location figures in futurist James Bond movies, too. As for America 'annexing Canada', I hope Trump has not read this book!.
If you've yet to hear any of our first sixty-eight Tales for Our Time, you can do so by joining The Mark Steyn Club. Or, if you need an extra-special present for someone, why not give your loved one a Gift Membership and start him or her off with over five dozen cracking yarns? And please join Mark tomorrow for another episode of Lord of the World.
