College at once offered a great forum for debate, and a richer comradeship with men of strong mental fiber.  Lane’s eagerness in discussion and love of large and sounding words made the students call him “Demosthenes Lane.”  In his letters it is easy to trace the gradual evolution from his early oratorical style into a final form of free, imaginative expression of great simplicity.  Meanwhile, as he debated, he gathered to himself men who were to be friends for the rest of his life.  The “Sid” of the earliest letters that we have is Dr. Sidney E. Mezes, now President of the College of the City of New York, to whom one of his last letters was addressed.  His friendship for Dr. Wigmore, Dean of Law at the Northwestern University, in Chicago, dates almost as far back.

In college, Lane seized what he most wanted in courses on Philosophy and Economics.  “His was a mind of many facets and 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