claims of the public, the shippers, and the railroads, did not solve all the issues involved in new and profoundly interesting cases coming up for adjudication.  In addition to this natural desire to expand and perfect the technique of administration of his Commission, Lane dreaded the great increase in social and financial demands involved in a Cabinet position.  In addition to these reasons, the change in service would mean work with men that he knew only slightly, if at all, and under a President whom he had never met.  Perhaps the consideration that weighed more heavily than any of these, in his feeling of reluctance, was that the portfolio of the Department of the Interior, with its congeries of ill-assorted bureaus was in itself unattractive to a man with Lane’s love of logical order.  His liking for strong team-work and for the building of morale among a force of mutually helpful workers seemed to have no possible promise of gratification among bureau chiefs as unrelated as those of the General Land Office, the Indian Office, the Bureau of Pensions, Patent Office, Bureau of Education, Geological Survey, Reclamation Service, and Bureau of Mines.

It was, therefore, with something of the spirit of a drafted man that Lane set his face toward his new work.  Members of his immediate family recall days of depression after the appointment first came, but the cordial response of the press of the country to his appointment, the flooding in of many hundreds of letters and telegrams of congratulation, and President Wilson’s own cordiality—­lifted Lane’s mood to its normal hopefulness.

In relating the history of the appointment itself, Arthur W. Page, of the World’s Work, writes, after talking with E. M. House of the matter, “House recommended Lane, as perhaps the one man available, adapted to any Cabinet position from Secretary of State down.  At one time Lane was slated for the War Department, at another time another department and finally placed as Secretary of the Interior because being a good conservationist, as a Western man he could promote conservation with more tact and less criticism than an Eastern man.”

Confronted by a complex and definite task, Lane’s mind quickened to the attack.  The situation of the Indian seized his sympathy.  In his first official report he wrote, “That the Indian is confused in mind as to his status and very much at sea as to our ultimate purpose toward him is not surprising.  For a hundred years he has been spun round like a blindfolded child in a game of blindman’s buff.  Treated as an enemy at first, overcome, driven from his lands, negotiated with most formally as an independent nation, given by treaty a distinct boundary which was never to be changed while water runs and grass grows,’ he later found himself pushed beyond that boundary line, negotiated with again, and then set down upon a reservation, half captive, half protege.”

With this at heart Lane wrote a letter of vigorous appeal to John H. Wigmore to become his First Assistant.