library containing
volumes in defense of the Bootstrap-lifters, published under the
auspices of the Wholesale Pickpockets. I enter, and find endless
vistas of shelves, also several thousand current magazines and papers.
I consult these--for my legs have given out in the effort to visit and
inspect all phases of the Bootstrap-lifting practice. I discover that
hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or
revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all
the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and
liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting.
There are the Holy Roman Bootstrap-lifters, whose priests are fed
by Transubstantiation; the established Anglican Bootstrap-lifters,
whose priests live by "livings"; the Baptist Bootstrap-lifters,
whose preachers practice total immersion in Standard Oil. There
are Yogi Bootstrap-lifters with flowing robes of yellow silk;
Theosophist Bootstrap-lifters with green and purple auras; Mormon
Bootstrap-lifters, Mazdaznan Bootstrap-lifters, Spiritualist and
Spirit-Fruit, Millerite and Dowieite, Holy Roller and Holy Jumper,
Come-to-glory negro, Billy Sunday base-ball and Salvation Army
bass-drum Bootstrap-lifters. There are the thousand varieties of "New
Thought" Bootstrap-lifters; the mystic and transcendentalist,
Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard
high-art Bootstrap-lifters with half a million magazinelets at two
bits apiece; the "uplift" and "optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and
Orison Swett Marden Bootstrap-lifters with a hundred thousand volumes
at one dollar per volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and
Kantian professors of collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-lifting at
several thousand dollars per year each. There are the Nietzschean
Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves to the Superman, and the
art-for-art's-sake, neo-Pagan Bootstrap-lifters, who lift themselves
down to the Ape.

Excepting possibly the last-mentioned group, the priests of all
these cults, the singers, shouters, prayers and exhorters of
Bootstrap-lifting have as their distinguishing characteristic that
they do very little lifting at their own bootstraps, and less at any
other man's. Now and then you may see one bend and give a delicate
tug, of a purely symbolical character: as when the Supreme Pontiff of
the Roman Bootstrap-lifters comes once a year to wash the feet of the
poor; or when the