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.