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.