Perhaps Buchman's clearest statement of his position on these matters was expressed in 1928 in a letter to Alexander Smith, then Executive Secretary of Princeton University and later US Senator for New Jersey, who had passed on a letter containing a criticism of his association with the eminent. 'The point is this: are we seeking titled people for any social position it can give us, or is our direction the changing of their lives?' he wrote. 'If it were the former I should say the criticism was justified.... I think there is a danger of a certain type of American who has such a false sense of democracy that he feels it is a form of snobbery to mention them. They are a part of the machinery of European life, and they have souls just the same as the middle and lower classes, and there are very few people who run the risk of the abuse that one naturally encounters in changing them.... The same is true in America. There are certain people whose names go down on committees. We have studiously avoided all such patronage. ... I am frankly out to change the leaders and to create the leadership that will change present conditions.'7

Buchman's correspondence also shows that throughout his life he kept in equally close touch with the 'unprivileged'. In the 1920s these were often confined to two groups - his many old Pennsylvanian friends, like Bill Pickle and Mary Hemphill, and the staff of hotels or houses in which he had stayed, entire lists of whom appear in his revised address books until the day of his death. Not until the remarkable expansion of his work in Britain and elsewhere in the 1930s did he make deep friendships with many industrial workers and unemployed people.

Back in Oxford in March 1922 he was given two rooms at Christ Church by the Senior Censor, R. H. Dundas. 'Here is a man who could stir Oxford. How, I am at a loss to explain,' went one contemporary account of his stay there. 'He sat for two weeks in a room and by the end of it the College was sharply divided into pro and anti-FBs. He addressed a meeting in College soon after arrival at which an influential section of the undergraduates came with a concerted scheme for a "rag". But somewhere they felt their witticisms out of place, and the attack fell flat.' The occasion was probably a debate of the 19 Club on 'This House considers that man is his own worst enemy'. In a scribbled note he wrote, 'I didn't question their beliefs. I told them of the power of the Holy Spirit.'

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