were prominently portrayed. The people refused to take his
nomination seriously, for since the foundation of The Tribune
he had opposed the party whose standard-bearer he became.
Because of the caricatures spread over the country Greeley was
forced to take the stump, "not to advocate political claims, but
to show that he retained some semblance of the human form."
The illness of his wife later demanded his constant presence at
her bedside, day and night, until her death just seven days
before his crushing defeat at the ballot box. On November 7,
1872, Greeley published a note under his own signature "that
the undersigned resumed the editorship of The Tribune which he
relinquished on embarking on another business six months ago."
That Greeley assumed the editorship only in name was shown
by the insertion of another editorial not from Greeley's pen
entitled "Crumbs of Comfort." In the second editorial men-
tion was made that "every red-nosed politician who had cheated
the caucus and fought at the polls looked to the editor of The
Tribune to secure an appointment as a gauger, or as an army
chaplain, or as Minister to France"; and that in frequent in-
stances the editor of The Tribune was telegraphed in frantic haste
to come to the Capitol to "save this bill, to crush that one, to
promote one project and to stop another." A crumb of comfort
was that office-seekers would now keep aloof from the defeated
candidate who had not influence enough to get any one ap-
pointed as "a deputy sub-assistant temporary clerk in the paste-
pot section of the folding-room at Washington."
Greeley's amazement at reading the second editorial must have been greater than that of any of the subscribers. In vain did he try to secure the insertion of the following note of correc- tion :
By some unaccountable fatality, an article entitled "Crumbs of Comfort" crept into our last, unseen by the editor, which does him the grossest wrong. It is true that office seekers used to pester him for recommendations when his friends controlled the custom house, though the "red nosed" variety was seldom found among them; it is not true that he ever obeyed a summons to Washington in order that he might there promote or oppose this or that private scheme. In short, the article is a monstrous fable, based on some other experience than that of any editor of this
