I ventured this opinion one night at dinner. Mrs. Pankhurst, the English suffragist, was there, and four or five others. They laughed at the idea; said Russia must have a strong hand; called Kerensky a weakling, and declared that only Korniloff could save the situation. He would rule with an iron hand. One group of foreigners in Petrograd saw clearly the hopelessness of trying to impose a man on horseback upon the Russian workers. They were the members of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia. They came quietly into town one afternoon in August, with seventy tons of surgical supplies in their kit-bags, a large amount of common sense in their heads, and a wealth of human sympathy in their hearts. I was at the Nicolaievski Station when they arrived, twenty-nine of them, all in uniform of the American Red Cross. I looked at them and said to myself: “I wonder what sort of a dent you will make in Russia.” In one of the uniforms was the ample girth and the smiling round face of Colonel William B. Thompson, who was financing the mission. To the left of him, towering like an iron-gray mountain above the crowd, was Dr. Frank Billings of Chicago. On the other side, Raymond Robins, dark and determined, with a ready-for-anything look about him. There was something big about this trio, and they went to work on the Russian job in the best American spirit--with their sleeves rolled up. They met the Russian aristocrat and the Russian bourgeois. Then they met the Russian people. Breshkovskaya and Tchaikovski, grandmother and grandfather of the Russian Revolution, opened for them a door through which they looked down a long vista of hard years at the stupendous struggle of a brave crowd. They saw that the old altars had been broken to bits, and the one vital, hopeful thing remaining was the devotion of the masses to their Revolution. They had no faith in the altruistic intention of the German, and believed for Russia to stop fighting would be suicidal. Kerensky and Breshkovskaya held the same belief, but they knew also that the war-weary multitudes were possessed of a consuming longing for peace; that German propaganda was working to discredit the Allies and to convince the Russians that the German people sympathized with their Revolution and shared their longing for democratic peace. Almost daily they were supplementing their propaganda by blowing up munition plants and laying whole towns in ruins. Raymond Robins, who brought to his study of the situation valuable experience in the American labor movement, said to me, in one of the first conversations we had: “The only binder that will hold New Russia together is the Revolution. The only way to help Russia is to help her make a success of that Revolution.”