"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. 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."