G. Ward Price, one of Britain's leading reporters of the period, visited Canada just after the Oxford Group team left. 'I found the whole Dominion, from Vancouver to Quebec, discussing the success of the mission of the Oxford Group,' he wrote in the Sunday Pictorial. 'I must admit I was impressed by the hold it has evidently taken on the minds of many Canadians whose education and knowledge of the world would safeguard them against mere emotional methods.'9

In March 1934 Buchman led a second, larger expedition to Canada, with side forays into the United States. The trip through Canada was, as to the crowds and official receptions, a repeat of the year before. But Buchman, from the first, had told his team, 'Our aim is not to win new people, but to get everyone to apply their new experience in the life of the nation. Last rime we drove in some pylons. Now we must raise the building upon them.'10 'The Oxford Group and World Peace' and 'Oxford Group Influence on Racial Strife' were the titles of two editorials in the Toronto Mail and Empire,11 while the Ottawa Citizen 12 wrote of the implications of the Group's message for unemployment. The Colonist of Victoria, BC, stated: 'The Oxford Group seemed to one observer to have grown in sensitiveness to the needs of humanity. . . The listener need not deduce that the movement has in any way retired from its leading tenets nor is giving up its characteristic modes of religious life . . . But without doubt, it is giving a new emphasis. It is facing up to the social implications of the gospel.'13

A just rebuke, however, came from the Ottawa Evening Journal when Holme inferred from the case of his friend Hallward in Montreal that 'the people of Canada are beginning to pay their taxes on a basis of "absolute honesty"'. '"Beginning" is the word used,' commented the paper. 'The inference that Canadians generally have been dishonest in their income tax payments and that it remained for the Oxford Group to convert them to honest practices, is one which touring ladies and gentlemen would find it difficult to maintain.' Nevertheless, the paper added, 'there is room for improvement'. The statement seemed 'to value this evangelical movement according to its measurable cash return,' the editorial concluded. 'We should like to be permitted to think its objectives are on a higher plane.'14

An early part of the tour was spent in the Maritimes, unvisited the previous year. From there Buchman planned to move to the prairie-provinces, and this time he was determined that he would not do all the preparation work. Rather he saw it as a way to train younger people by throwing them in at the deep end. One of them, Howard Blake, remembers a night of planning as the train took them from the Maritimes to Toronto: 'While most slept peacefully in the darkened sleeping cars, one drawing room glowed with the light as Frank and a group of friends gathered round the table to plan a lightning dash right across the continent. After two days in Toronto, they were to visit in rapid succession Winnipeg and Regina, there divide into two simultaneous visits in Calgary and Edmonton, to meet again in Vancouver, then Victoria and Seattle. After that was to come a final training period at Banff before the force returned for the summer assembly at Oxford.

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