These criticisms were to recur throughout Buchman's life. Since his days with the 'unprivileged' in Overbrook, his view had become that any really effective social or economic change had to spring from a thorough-going transformation in people of every class: the old principle of personal evangelism, he told Shoemaker, 'takes care of the social aspect when thoroughly thought through and sincerely applied'.5 Without that transformation, he felt, any social or economic change was likely to be superficial. An event like the Russian Revolution, for example, might only substitute one form of oppression for another. Throughout his life, whatever the contemporary norm, he was more stringent in his challenges to the privileged than to the disadvantaged.*

(* At one of his first house-parties in Switzerland, where a well-to-do audience sang Luther's hymn 'A safe stronghold our God is still', his immediate comment was, 'I wonder how many of you really feel your safe stronghold is your bank account?')

It is clear that, feeling commissioned to try and change the world, Buchman regarded it as his duty to aim to change those people whose transformation would most quickly affect society at large. That, he believed, would create a more radical and lasting impact than any revolution of a purely political kind. 'Frank', said Eustace Wade,* who met him in 1921 as a Cambridge undergraduate, 'felt that leadership must come from the top. He saw a moribund establishment being reactivated by an inner spiritual power.' Dr Mahlon Hellerich, for many years Archivist of the Lehigh Valley Historical Society, regards it as most remarkable that a Pennsylvania Dutchman should undertake such a mission. They were brought up to be deferential to prominent people, but here was one actually trying to change them.

(* Later Chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge, and father of the Wimbledon tennis champion, Virginia Wade.)

This meant that Buchman took care to go where he would meet such people, and also that he used their change or support - if they themselves had publicly stated it - to interest others. So he mentioned names - but he did not break the confidences that people, of whatever eminence, entrusted to him, and if asked whether this or that person was associated with his work, would answer, 'Why don't you ask them?'

He had no wish to reach only the upper strata of society. 'I want to make it [the message] available to the masses who are hungry but unaware . . .,' he wrote Shoemaker in 1920. 'The hunger for God is in every human breast. This is for everyone.'6 'We are after the kings and the poor and needy as well,' he said to another friend later. 'I know some poor and needy kings.'

His friendships, from 1909 onwards, with so many branches of the intertwined royal families of Europe, had sprung from the meeting with Princess Sophie of Greece in 1908. Undoubtedly he was initially amazed, and not a little excited, by the way an uncalculated act of kindness to two elderly Americans had led him into such intimate relations with the Greek royal family and by title fact that they had passed him on to their relatives all over Europe. He felt that only God could have arranged such a sequence of events for a 'small-town boy', and so he took the responsibility seriously. Perhaps because he came from an age when a royal 'request' was a command, he was ready to change his plans to respond to the urgent calls from these quarters. Also, he was aware that any change of heart in such people, still then in power in their countries, could have particular importance for the world, and he never concealed that such change was his aim. However, the loss of power which befell so many in no way altered his care for or treatment of them.

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