question.  He can not be treated as a pirate, I suppose, because there can not be such a thing as a pirate ship commanded by an officer of a foreign navy and flying a foreign flag.  But he plainly pursued the policy of a pirate, and I am expecting any day to find Germany apologizing and offering amends.  But there may be some audacious logic by which Germany can justify such conduct.  Talking of Belgium, I was referred the other day to the report of the debates in the House of Commons found in the 10th volume of Cobbett’s Parliamentary Reports, touching the attack on Copenhagen by England in 1808, in which the Ministry justified its ruthless attack upon a neutral power in almost precisely the same language that Von Bethmann Hollweg used in justifying the attack on Belgium, and Lord Ponsonby used the sort of reasoning then, in answer to the Government, that England is now using in answer to Germany.  I was distrustful of the quotations that were given to me and looked the volume up, and found that England was governed by much the same idea that Germany was—­just sheer necessity.  Of course, your answer is that we have traveled a long way since 1808.

Doesn’t it look to you an impossible task for England and France to get beyond the Rhine, or even get there?  England, of course, has hardly tried her hand in the game yet and if the Turk is cleaned up she will have a lot of Australians and others to help out in Belgium.  Sir George Paish told me they expect to have a million and a half men in the field by the end of this summer.

Pfeiffer comes here to-day to spend a couple of days trying to do something for the State Department; I don’t know just what, but I shall be mighty glad to see the old chap.  I haven’t seen anything of Lamb since his return.

Do write me again.  Affectionately yours,

FRANKLIN K. LANE

On the sixteenth of March Lane again started for San Francisco, crossing the continent for the third time within a month.  Vice-President Marshall, Adolph C. Miller, now of the Federal Reserve Board, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant Secretary of the Navy, who were going out to visit officially the Exposition, were the principal members of the party.  In Berkeley, on March twenty-third, 1915, Lane received his degree from the University of California.  In conferring this degree President Wheeler said:—­

“Franklin K. Lane,—­Your Alma Mater gladly writes to-day your name upon her list of honour,—­in recognition not so much of your brilliant and unsparing service to state and nation, as of your sympathetic insight into the institutions of popular government as the people intended them.  An instinctive faith in the righteous intentions of the average man has endowed you with a singular power to discern the best intent of the public will.  Men follow gladly in your lead, and are not deceived.

“By direction of the Regents of the University of California I confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Laws:—­