hospitable in its interest," says his college and lifelong friend, Adolph C. Miller, "but his years at Berkeley were devoted mainly to the study of Philosophy and Government, and kindred subjects. He was a leading figure in the Political Science Club, and intent in his pursuit of philosophy. Often he could be seen walking back and forth in a room in the old Bacon library, set apart for the more serious-minded students, with some philosophical book in hand; every line of his face expressing deep concentration, the occasional light in his eye clearly betraying the moment when he was feeling the joy of understanding."

In two years, not waiting for formal graduation, Lane was back in the world of public affairs that he had scarcely left. In the same short-cut way he took his Hastings Law School work, and passed his Supreme Court examination in 1888, in much less than the time usually allowed for the work.

By the time he left the law school, "a full fledged, but not a flying attorney," his desire for aggressive citizenship was fully formed. In fact, the whole active campaign, that was his life, was made by the light of early ideals, enlarged and reinterpreted as his climb to power brought under his survey wider horizons.

The sketchiest summary of his early and late activities brings out the singleness of the central purpose moving through his life. His first fight, in 1888, for Ballot Reform was made that the will of the people of the State might be honestly interpreted; later, in Tacoma, Washington, he sided with his printers, against his interest as owner, in their fight to maintain union wages; once more in San Francisco, he took, without a retaining fee, the case of the blackmailed householders whose titles were threatened by the pretensions of the Noe claimants, and with his brother, cleared title to all of their small homes; he joined, with his friend, Arthur McEwen, in an editorial campaign against the Southern Pacific, in the day of its tyrannous power over all the shippers of California; later he drafted into the charter of San Francisco new provisions to improve the wages of all city employees; as its young city and county attorney, he aggressively protected the city against street railway encroachments, successfully enforcing the law against infractions; as Interstate Commerce Commissioner, he disentangled a network of injustices in the relations between shippers and railroads, exposed rebating and demurrage evils; formulated new procedures in deflating, reorganizing, and zoning the business of all the express companies in the country; as Secretary of the Interior, he confirmed to the people a fuller use of Federal Lands, and National Park Reserves, laid the foundation for the development, on public domain, of water powers, and the leasing of Government oil lands, and built the Government railroad in Alaska; during the War, he contributed to the Council of National Defense his inexhaustible enthusiasm for cooperation, with definite plans for swift action, to focus National resources to meet war needs; and finally, his last carefully elaborated plan—killed by a partisan Congress—was to place returned soldiers upon the land under conditions of hopeful and decent independence. These were some of the "glories" of activity into which he poured the resources of his energy and imagination.

But no catalogue of the work or the salient mental characteristics of Franklin Lane gives a picture of the man, without taking into account his temperament, for that colored every hour of his life, and every act of his career. The things that he knew seized his imagination. Even when a middle-aged man he sang, like a troubadour, of the fertility of the soil; he was stirred by the virtue and energy of what he saw and touched; his heart leaped at the thought of the power of water ready to be unlocked for man's use—most happy in that the thing that was his he could love.

"To lose faith in the future of oil!" he cries, in the midst of a sober statistical letter, "Why! that is as unthinkable as to lose faith in your hands. Oil, coal, electricity, what are these but multiplied and more adaptable, super-serviceable hands? They may temporarily be unemployed, but the world can't go round without them." A man who feels poetry in petroleum suffers from no wistful "desire of the moth for the star." To his full sense of life the moth and the star are of one essential substance, parts of one glorious conquerable creation—and the moth just a fleck of star- dust, with silly wings.

In truth, both then and throughout most of the days of his life he was completely oriented in this world, at home here, with his strong feet planted upon reality. He liked so many homely things, that his friendly glance responded to common sunlight without astigmatism.

That his sympathies should have outrun his repugnances was of great practical moment in what he was able to achieve in a life shortened at both ends, for though he had to lose time by earning his own professional equipment, he lost little energy in friction. He wrote to a political aspirant for high office, in 1921, "Pick a few enemies and pick them with discretion. Chiefly be FOR things." To a man who was making a personal attack on an adversary of Lane's, while in 1914, as Secretary of the Interior, he was engrossed in establishing his "conservation-by-use" policy, in opposition to the older and narrower policy of conservation by withdrawal, Lane wrote, "I have never seen any good come by blurring an issue by personal conflict or antagonisms. … I have no time to waste in fighting people … to fight for a thing the best way is to show its advantages, and the need for it … and my only solicitude is that the things I care for should not be held back by personal disputes." …

This lesson he had learned more from his own temperament than from political expediency. It was bound up in his love of efficiency and also in his sense of humor. During this same hot conservation controversy he writes to an old friend, "I have no intention of saying anything in reply to Pinchot. He wrote me thirty pages to prove that I was a liar, and rather than read that again I will admit the fact."

This preoccupation with the main issue, in getting beneficial results was one thing that made him glad to acclaim and use the gifts of other men. Through his sympathies he could follow as well as lead, and he caught enthusiasms as well as kindled them. He believed in enthusiasm for itself, and because he saw in it one of the great potencies of life. In writing of D'Annunzio's placing Italy beside the Allies, he rejoices in the beautiful spectacle of the spirit of a whole people "blown into flame by a poet-patriot." But "the ideal," he urges, "must be translated into the possible. Man cannot live by bread alone—nor on manna."

His gay and challenging attitude toward life expressed only one mood, for he paid, as men must, for intense buoyancy of temper by black despairs. "Damn that Irish temperament, anyway!" he writes. "O God, that I had been made a stolid, phlegmatic, non-nervous, self-satisfied Britisher, instead of a wild cross between a crazy Irishman with dreams, desires, fancies—and a dour Scot with his conscience and his logical bitterness against himself—and his eternal drive!"

His exaggerations of hope and his moods of broken disappointment, his ever-springing faith in men, and in the possibility of just institutions, were more temperamental than logical. Moods of astonished grief, when men showed greed and instability, gave place to humorous and tolerant analysis of characters and events. Even his loyalty to his friends was subject to the slight magnetic deflections of a man of moods. He was true to them as the needle to the pole; and with just the same piquing oscillations, before the needle comes to rest at the inevitable North.

Because he had caught, in its capricious rhythms, the