The spirited and ambitious author is caught in a trap of potboiling and hack-work in order to pay the rent, while the proprietor is locked in a cost-cutting war with (in this case) the New York Times. Of the toil he had to perform to make ends meet, Marx self-hatingly wrote that it amounted to “grinding bones and making soup of them like the paupers in a workhouse.” Meanwhile, Greeley is bitching about the cut-throat and race-to-the-bottom tactics of the New York Times: “crowding us too hard… conducted with the most policy and the least principle of any paper ever started. It is ever watching
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