For this purpose he had to maintain that it could be carried out in the near future. With Buchez' state aid for associations he combined the Chartist cry of universal suffrage. He overlooked the fact that conditions in Germany and England were different. He overlooked the lessons of the Second Empire with regard to universal suffrage. Moreover from the outset, like everyone who declares that he has a panacea for the sufferings of the masses in his pocket, he gave his agitation a religious and sectarian character.
Every sect is in fact religious.
Further, just because he was the founder of a sect, he denied all natural connection with the earlier movement both in Germany and outside. He fell into the same mistake as Proudhon , and instead of looking among the genuine elements of the class movement for the real basis of his agitation, he tried to prescribe their course to these elements according to a certain dogmatic recipe. Most of what I am now saying after the event I foretold to Lassalle in 1862, when he came to London and invited me to place myself with him at the head of the new movement. You yourself have experienced in your own person the opposition between the movement of a sect and the movement of a class. Therefore when at Hamburg you proposed the congress for the formation of trade unions you were only able to defeat the opposition of the sect by threatening to resign from the office of president.