His love and loyalty to past ties, though great and persistent, still left his ideal of loyalty unsatisfied.  Toward the end of his life he wrote, “Roots we all have and we must not be torn up from them and flung about as if we were young things that could take hold in any soil.  I have been—­America has been—­too indifferent to roots—­home roots, school roots. ...  We should love stability and tradition as well as love adventure and advancement.”  But the practical labors of his life were directed toward creating means to modify tradition in favor of a larger sort of justice than the past had known.

Resignation had no part in his political creed.  “I hold with old Cicero ‘that the whole glory of virtue is in activity,’” comes from him with the ring of authentic temperament.  And of a friend’s biography he wrote, “What a fine life—­all fight, interwoven with fun and friendship.”

[Illustration with caption:  Franklin K. Lane with his younger brothers, George and Frederic]

All the anecdotes of his boyhood show him in action, moving among his fellows, organizing, leading, and administering rough-and-tumble justice.

From grammar school in Napa he went, for a time, to a private school called Oak Mound.  In vacation, when he was eleven years old, he was earning money as messenger-boy, and at about that time as general helper to one of the merchants of the little town.  He left in his old employer’s mind the memory of a boy “exceedingly bright and enterprising.”  He recalls a fight that he was told about, between Lane “and a boy of about his size,” “and Frank licked him,” the old merchant exults, “and as he walked away he said, ’If you want any more, you can get it at the same place.’”

It was in Napa—­so he could not have been quite twelve years old—­ that Lane started to study Spanish, so that he might talk more freely to the ranchers, who drove to town in their rickety little carts, to “trade” at the stores.

In 1876, the family moved from the full sunshine of the valley town, with its roads muffled in pale dust, and its hillsides lifting up the green of riotous vines, to Oakland, cool and cloudy, with a climate to create and sustain vigor.  In Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco, Lane entered the High School.  Again his schoolmates recall him with gusto.  He was muscular in build, “a good short-distance runner.”  His hands—­ always very characteristic of the man—­were large and well-made, strong to grasp but not adroit in the smaller crafts of tinkering.  “He impressed me,” an Oakland schoolmate writes, “as a sturdy youngster who had confidence in himself and would undoubtedly get what he went after.  Earnest and straightforward in manner,” and always engrossed in the other boys, “when they walked down Twelfth Street, on their way to school, they had their arms around each other’s shoulders, discussing subjects of ‘vast importance.’”