Kollontai is like a sculptor working on some heroic figure of woman and always wondering a little why the slim, inspired, unmaternal figure of her dreams is forever melting back into a heavy, earthy figure of Eve. It often happens that a character is best portrayed by conversations which show the manner of mind. In this chapter I have quoted Madame Kollontai at some length because she is the only articulate voice of the new order for women which has been so greatly misunderstood outside of Russia; that order which claims that by consecrating oneself to the state one lives truer to oneself and to others. As champion of her sex, she cries to the women of Russia: “Cast off your chains! Do not be slaves to religion, to marriage, to children. Break these old ties, the state is your home, the world is your country!” And who are the women she thus extolls? They are the women of the factories and the fields; the women who sweep the streets, who scrub, who carry heavy burdens, who plow and weave and drudge. Will they be able to follow her to such heights? By our logic, no, but Kollontai preaches a new logic for Russia. Besides, we must consider just what she means by “casting off chains.” I have heard her say all this another way and it did not sound so lofty or impossible. To an individualist, it did not even sound attractive. Last summer she admonished a women’s congress in this manner: “We must build a new society in which women are not expected to drudge all day in kitchens. We must have, in Russia, community restaurants, central kitchens, central laundries--institutions which leave the working woman free to devote her evenings to instructive reading or recreation. Only by breaking the domestic yoke will we give women a chance to live a richer, happier and more complete life.” The material which Kollontai is so passionately attempting to mould is the peasant mind. It seems to me that peasant women are naturally slow-moving and stolidly honest and will accept only as much of Kollontai’s philosophy as they find compatible with or necessary to the immediate situation; not because they are lacking in spirituality, for they are capable of deep religious fervor, but simply because much of it would be inharmonious and artificial to their normal development. At present her mission is to awaken them so that they may build a truth of their own which need by no means be a lesser truth than Kollontai’s. If she attempts to make them swallow her formula intact she will certainly fail. If she compromises as Lenin compromises and as Kalinin does, she will perform for Russia a never-to-be-forgotten task. To-day everything has been melted down in the crucible of the revolution. The only banner-bearer who counts is the one who will give to the great mass of those emerging into the new day the broad fundamental things of life.