The things which most contributed to my want of newspaper success in New York and eventually drove me, though much against my will and understanding, into an easier and more agreeable phase of life were, first, that of the grinding and almost disgusting forces of life itself which I found in Spencer and Huxley and Balzac and which now haunted me and, due possibly to a physical condition at this time, made it impossible for me to work with any of the that had characterized my work in the West. Next, there was that contrast between wealth and poverty, here more sharply emphasized than anywhere else in America, which gave the great city a gross and cruel and mechanical look, and this was emphasized not only by the papers themselves, with their various summaries of and exposures, but also by my own hourly contact with it—a look so harsh and indifferent at times as to leave me a little . Again, there was something in the sharp contrast between the ideals and preachments of such a constantly moralizing journal as the World and the heartless and aspect of its internal economy. Men such as myself were machines or privates in an ill-paid army to be thrown into any . There was no time off for the space-men, unless it was for all time. One was expected to achieve the results desired or get out; and if one did achieve them the reward was nothing.  
One day I met an acquaintance and asked about an ex-city editor from St. Louis who had come to New York, and his answer staggered me.
 
“Oh, Cliff? Didn’t you hear? Why, he committed suicide down here in a West Street hotel.”
 
“What was the trouble?” I asked.
 
“Tired of the game, I guess,” he replied. “He didn’t get along down here as well as he had out there. I guess he felt that he was going downhill.”
 
I walked away, . He had been an excellent newspaper man, as brisk and self-centered as one need be to . The last time I had seen him he was in good physical condition, and yet, after something like a year in New York, he had killed himself.
 
However, my mood was not that of one who runs away from a grueling contest. I had no notion of leaving New York, whatever happened, although I constantly speculated as to what I should do when all my money was gone. I had no trade or profession beyond this reporting, and yet I was convinced that there must be something else that I could do. Come what might, I was that I would ask no favor of my brother, and as for my sister, who was now a burden on my hands, I was determined that as soon as this burden became too great I would take up her case with my brother Paul, outline all that had been done and ask him to shoulder the difference until such time as I could find myself in whatever work I was to do.
 
But what was it?
 
One of the things which oppressed me was the fact that on the World, as well as on the other papers, were men as young as myself who were of a very different , mentally if not . Life and this fierce contest which I was taking so much to heart seemed in no wise to disturb them. By reason of and insight perhaps, possibly the lack of it, or, what was more likely, certain fortunate circumstances attending their youth and upbringing, they were part of that oncoming host of professional and yea-sayers, chorus-like in character, which for thirty years or more thereafter in American life was constantly engaged in the pleasing task of emphasizing the possibilities of success, progress, strength and what not for all, in America and elsewhere, while at the same time they were and before the strong, the lucky, the prosperous. On the World alone at this time, to say nothing of the other papers, were at least a dozen, swaggering about in the best of clothes, their manners those of a graduate of Yale or Harvard or Princeton, their minds stuffed with all the noble of the uplifters. There was nothing wrong with the world that could not be easily and quickly righted, once the honest, just, true, kind, turned their giant and selected brains to the task. This newest type of young newspaper man was to have no traffic with evil in any form; he was to concern himself with the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Many of these young men pretended to an intimate working knowledge of many things: society, politics, finance and what not else. Several had evidently made t............