In all

his feet protruding in several directions through his fragmentary shoes. His wan, unwashed face, his lack-lustre eyes, his long, thin, grimy hands implied a condition of extreme weakness and half starvation. Under his arm he carried a yellow dog as disconsolate and travelstained as himself.

Mr.

All through his career at Washington, Mr. Lane has indulged this amiable weakness. The most trusted subordinates have not been politically recommended candidates, but the men whom he has known and liked in less prosperous days. Mr. John H. Marble, for many years Mr. Lane's secretary on the Interstate Commerce Commission, has succeeded him as a member of that important body. Mr. James D. Phelan, Mr. Lane's old political comrade in San Francisco- the man who really launched Mr. Lane in his political career was his own selection for the Cabinet post which he actually holds himself. A significant fate has followed the men who twenty years ago worked with the present Secretary on the Tacoma News. Two of his most accomplished reporters now fill responsible positions on the Interstate Commerce Commission. Mr. Lane had hardly taken the oath of office as Secretary of the Interior when he appointed his old German partner in this same newspaper enterprise surveyor-general of the state of Washington.

"Poor Roediger," says the Secretary, as he pensively recalls those early Tacoma days, "he died two weeks after I had appointed him."

This love of old associates, however, is not one-sided; Mr. Lane's old friends remember him as tenaciously as he remembers them. He had a striking illustration of this one day ten years ago when he was making a campaign for the governorship of California. He had established his headquarters on the tenth floor of one of the best known San Francisco buildings. One day an amazing spectre appeared before the bustling, shirt-sleeved candidate. It was a middle aged man, dirty,

"Well, who are you?" said Mr. Lane, after he had recovered his self-control.

Don't you remember me, Mr. Lane?' The far-away, familiar voice and language seemed out of keeping with the tramplike make-up. "I'm 'Ham and Eggs.'

Those words at once explained the mystery. The Tacoma News, under Mr. Lane's editorship, had a particularly bright and popular reporter who, whenever the occasion demanded, used to interview grandiloquently two well known local Negroes on questions of state and international import. The high flown, Johnsonian language and the philosophic sentiments of these interviews, in contrast with the well known characteristics of the two darkeys known as "Ham and Eggs" -furnished the element of humor.

"For Heaven's sake, where did you come from?" asked Mr. Lane, after he had pulled him into his private office. "From Southern California." "How did you get here?"

"I walked the whole way-four hundred miles."

His old employee, living quietly in the southern part of the state, had heard that Mr. Lane was making a campaign for governor. He immediately felt impelled to volunteer his assistance; and, not having the money for his railroad fare, he started forth on foot. A journey of this kind under the most favorable circumstances would have sufficiently tested his loyalty; across the forests and mountains and deserts of Southern California, however, the undertaking was really heroic. The man tramped all day and slept in the open sage-brush at night. On the way he picked up a friendless and dilapidated dog, and together the two trudged silently toward San Francisco. It was not until the man reached the building in which Mr. Lane had his headquarters, however

that his devotion was supremely tested. The elevator boy refused to let the man enter the car; tramps were not allowed in the building, and the rules likewise excluded dogs. The stranger patiently tucked the mongrel under his arm and walked up nine flights of stairs!

Naturally, Mr. Lane put his devoted associate to work. He did excellent service in the campaign. Should "Ham and Eggs" ultimately turn up as an employee in the Interior Department, probably no one who understands Mr. Lane's political habits would be surprised.

It

And when one has told this story, he has unfolded the mainspring of Mr. Lane's character and largely explained his political and personal success. also makes clear that the President has acted wisely in selecting him for the Interior Department. There is certainly no Cabinet office that makes such insistent exactions upon one's human qualities. No department brings the Federal organization so closely to the people, or touches them at so many vital points. For several years after its organization, Mr. Lane's branch of the national service was known as the Home Department the title which it bears in England to-day. It is regrettable that Congress ever changed the name, it is so comprehensively descriptive. Mr. Lane is the American "Home Secretary." His purview is exclusively domestic; he does not handle foreign politics, the currency, the army, Wall Street, or the embattled fleets; he deals chiefly with the many billion acres and the many million people living west of the Mississippi River. It is not so much in the public domain the arable acres, the reclamation projects, the mines, the forests, the coal-that he finds his predominant interest; his real occupations are the people themselves. Back of our well advertised national resources and the red-tape of officialdom the Secretary must have constantly in his vision the miner in the mountains, the stock-raiser on the desolate grazing lands, the reclamation pioneer hungrily seeking for a little water to feed to his thirsty crops, the homesteader on the outlook for a new location, the old soldier scanning the mails for his

quarterly pension, the Indian always ready to fall a prey to the harpies that encompass him. All these people, in a sense the wards of the Nation, look upon the Interior Department as a kind of general provider. They are the reason why the department exists. The Secretary's relation to them is paternal; the Indians actually call him "father." The Interior Department largely helped to wreck the Taft Administration, mainly because Mr. Ballinger could not approach his problem from this immediate human point of view. Just how successful Mr. Lane may prove we cannot say, for he has not yet been tested; he may be a Cromer in administration, a Clive in action or he may not; but a man whose winning character can compel an old associate to walk four hundred miles across the desert across the desert to say nothing of nine flights of stairs in a modern skyscraper - to render a small personal service, has qualities that in themselves promise well for success.

Mr. Lane's career, however, practically answers most of the questions likely to be asked concerning his attitude on certain pressing problems in his department. When he ran for the governorship of California in 1902, he described himself as a "Roosevelt-Democrat"; and admiration for Mr. Roosevelt has been one of the main inspirations of his life. The conspicuous spots in his career for the last twenty-five years emphasize this "progressive" tendency. Born in Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1864 thereby making himself ineligible to the Presidency the son of a modest Methodist preacher, Mr. Lane came to California when he was three years old, received his early education at the public schools, spent two years at the University of California, served a newspaper apprenticeship as a printer's devil, reporter, and editorial writer, and finally settled down to the practice of law. Like many other public men, especially those who think in new and possibly revolutionary lines, Mr. Lane owes his early intellectual stimulus to Henry George. In 1889 he came to New York as correspondent of several Western newspapers; here he be

came a member of the Reform Club, an institution which served not only as a headquarters for attacks upon the Republican tariff, but as a meeting place of certain young men who did not accept conventional ideas about the distribution of property and the functions of government. The central figure in this group was Henry George, then at the highest point of his personal influence. Whether Mr. Lane accepted Mr. George's ideas on the land question or not, his mind certainly changed its character as a result of this association. He then grasped one conception that still abides and that promises to influence his administration of the Interior Department; the belief which most people then regarded as "socialistic," and which has since become almost orthodox: that government, under modern conditions, does not exist merely to protect persons and property, but to make everybody better, happier, and as much a participant as possible in the advantages and comforts of life.

When, in 1892, Mr. Lane jumped back to the Pacific Coast, and became the editor and part owner of the Tacoma News, his editorial policy immediately showed the results of his friendship with Henry George. A strike broke out among the printers; Mr. Lane championed the cause of the strikers, became a member of their union, and has ever since figured as a friend of labor. He found that the dominant political gang was looting the city treasury; he exposed the situation — and "exposures" were not so common in 1892 as they have since become and sent the ring-leader to jail. The chief The chief of police was blackmailing the exploiters of vice; as a result of Mr. Lane's activities, he left town, and went to Alaska, where he quickly made a fortune of $300,000 in the mines. "You're the best friend I ever had," he afterward told Mr. Lane. Mr. Lane's editorial policy on the silver issue strikingly illustrates not only his economic sanity but his journalistic courage. His paper was the only one on the Pacific Coast that refused to support the free silver campaign. Afterward, however, Mr. Lane did support Mr. Bryan for the Presidency. He thought that Mr.

Bryan, though wrong on the financial question, was right on the main issuethe development, in the United States, of an exploiting class. "Not many Americans in 1896," says Mr. Lane, "saw that that was really the political question of the time, though most of us, looking back, see it now. Mr. Bryan was fundamentally right in his fight against special privilege, though wrong in regarding the free coinage of silver as an essential detail of his propaganda."

Mr. Lane's most immediate difficulty as editor of the Tacoma News, however, was not free silver, nor labor unions, nor municipal graft; "my all-absorbing problem," he says, lem," he says, "was to manipulate events so that the ghost would walk' regularly every Monday morning." He had a splendid time as editor; "there is no occupation so satisfactory," he says, "as editing an independent newspaper in a live, growing Western town; after I retire from public life I would ask no more genuinely agreeable and satisfactory way of spending my last years." Such an occupation, of course, is always beset with financial difficulties; and, when the panic of 1893 laid prostrate the Tacoma boom and forced the editorial staff of the Tacoma News, as Mr. Lane expresses it, "to retreat to the seashore and live on clams," he was glad to sell his half interest and go back home to San Francisco.

Here, in a few years, after serving several successful terms as district attorney, Mr. Lane conducted an energetic campaign for the governorship. This was in 1902. The mere fact that Mr. Lane, a Democrat, should aspire to this office in Republican California indicates a certain inborn audacity. What is more remarkable is that, in the opinion of his adherents, he actually won-only to have the dominant political powers count him out.

What is chiefly interesting in this campaign, however, are the issues. Ten years had passed since the Tacoma days; Mr. Lane was now a "forward looking" publicist in earnest. The accepted description in 1902 - a political eon has passed since then was that Mr. Lane was a "radical," unsafe and insane, a Socialist whatever that word may mean.

All that he did, however, was simply to preach what is now known as conservation." California had enormous tracts of forests, water-power sites, and arid lands. Mr. Lane suggested that the state assume the task of making these useful to the people. The state itself, he argued, should develop its water-power sites, and then turn them over to responsible people on terms that would promote the interests of all its citizens. It should build irrigation reservoirs and canals for the redemption of its desert lands; in other words, adopt the policy now generally known as "reclamation."

That Mr. Lane stood against the Southern Pacific political machine goes without saying. The public was then hearing for the first time the words "rebate" and "regulation," a subject upon which California needed detailed education, as subsequent events showed. The truth of the matter is, however, that the voters only dimly comprehended Mr. Lane's references to these abstruse matters they did not understand them for he was several years ahead of the procession. What they did understand and like was Mr. Lane himself. Whether his arguments on the new state activities made many votes is problematical; what really piled up his majority was his genial, smiling, conversational, style of campaign oratory, to say nothing of a handshake that overcame all opposition.

Soon after Mr. Lane's defeat or counting-out experience a distinguished visitor came to California, heard him make a speech, and shook his hand. This was President Roosevelt. At that time Mr. Roosevelt was engaged in one of his most celebrated contests his campaign to reform the Interstate Commerce Commission. For nearly twenty years this body had existed in a condition of somnolence. As an engine to control the railroads, it had practically no authority. Public opinion was now demanding something more effective—an active, serious commission that would have the power to fix rates, to enforce adequate service, to make the Government a vital figure in the management of these properties. In anticipation of this legislation, Mr.

Roosevelt was looking about for men of the new type of thinking as members of the reformed commission. As a Pacific Coast representative seemed desirable, Mr. Lane's appointment to the commission became almost inevitable.

Mr. Lane had hardly taken his seat when he began to give expression to his large stock of carefully accumulated ideas. The boldness, the directness, with which he made his points startled the public and the railroads. He assailed the greatest and most difficult situations first. Not an obscure backwoods railroad, but the Union Pacific; not a struggling upstart of finance, but Edward H. Harriman

Commissioner Lane proceeded to break his teeth upon problems of this magnitude. For years there had been more or less definite talk about railroad monopoly: Mr. Lane now showed the public, for the first time, precisely what this word monopoly signified. Under his crossexamination, Mr. Harriman laid bare all his plans. his plans. It was then that Mr. Harriman announced his intention of "going in and buying some more things;" not content with the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Illinois Central, and other similarly comprehensive properties, he had his eyes upon the Santa Fé. "Where was all this to end?" asked Mr. Lane: would Mr. Harriman go on until he had captured everything on the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts, thereby monopolizing all the railroads in the country? That was precisely what he would like to do, said Mr. Harriman. Perhaps, under efficient regulation, this might have been an excellent thing this view can be defended; Mr. Lane, however, is one of those who do not believe in railroad monopoly. In his view there is nothing so wicked and so contrary to the public interest. The idea that all the United States west of the Mississippi should be subject to the will of a single group of men was to him abhorrent. His famous report on the Union Pacific amalgamation showed how easily Mr. Harriman, by using the credit of one road to purchase another, would bring about such a situation. The breaking of the Union Pacific monopoly is largely his work. More

WHO

than any other man he is responsible for the frantic attempts made in the last few months to divorce the Southern Pacific from the Union Pacific.

Other notable cases, the decisions in which were written by Mr. Lane, lifted the Interstate Commerce Commission from the obscure position it had held and made it as vital an agent in directing national policy as is the Supreme Court. He forced the transcontinental railroads to put down their rates in the intermountain states; he wrote the decision which prohibited the Western lines from increasing their rates three years ago. The practical regulation of railroad charges by this new Federal authority is now a fixed fact. Popular government in the United States, largely as a result of these Franklin K. Lane cases, has advanced another peg.

And so we find that Mr. Lane comes to his new duties in the Interior Department with certain fundamental convictions. He believes in the extension of governmental powers. He believes that the national resources exist primarily for the people and only secondarily for investors and promoters. He would have California develop its water-power sites; naturally he would favor the Federal Government doing the same thing. He does not stand for monopoly in any form. He nourishes the sentiments of an early disciple of Henry George toward the powers that exploit. He was not afraid of the name of Harriman - it is hardly likely that he will tremble before the name of Guggenheim. He fought the battle of the shippers and the travelers when he was on the Interstate Commerce Commission; it is inconceivable that, as Secretary of the