THE TYRANNY OF SHAMS BY JOSEPH McCABE NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1916 PREFACE. THIS book is a frank criticism of most of the dominant ideas and institutions of our time: a confession of faith in nearly all the more daring heresies which hold, so to say, the firing line of our literature: a conception of a new social order and new planetary arrangement. It is therefore candidly egoistic, and I should like to explain the circumstances in which it was designed and written. It was conceived, and much of it was written, during the long voyage from Australia to England. At that time I had issued, if I may include the introduction to English readers of foreign writers, some fifty publications, and in these I had generally described remote periods of history, or even remoter periods of the earth's story or distant regions of the universe. Many had asked me to tell them things more intimate and important than the way in which stars were formed, or the manners of extinct Dinosaurs and ancient empresses: asked if thirty years' study of philosophy, science, and history had given me no interest in, or light upon, the problems of the hour. In Australasia this request was made more insistently than ever. Our ancient prejudices have been transplanted into the soil of the new world, and they have thriven there, like the gorse, the sparrow, the rabbit, and so many other pests which sentimental colonists have introduced in order to remind them of "home." But new ideas also have been imported, and they find a rich soil in the free, unconventional, enterprising colonial mind. Men and women are asking the same questions there as in London and New York.