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.