"The people of Schleswig-Holstein and their descendants in England and America, cannot be converted by preaching; this stiff-necked and conceited crew must learn through their own experience. They are doing that from year to year, but they are elementally conservative—just because America is so purely bourgeois, has absolutely no feudal past, and is therefore, proud of its purely bourgeois organization—and therefore, will only be freed through experience from old traditional intellectual rubbish. Hence with trade unions and such like, must be the beginning, if there is to be a mass movement, and every step forward must be forced upon them by a defeat. But, however, after the first step beyond the bourgeois viewpoint has been made, things will move faster, just like everything in America… and then the foreign element in the nation will make its influence felt by its greater mobility."
From the rise of a mass movement, therefore, Engels hopes not only for the revolutionization of the "native" workers, but at the same time the overcoming of a sectarian spirit and of doctrinairism amongst the foreign-born proletarians. The shifting of the center of gravity to the native workers in the trade unions is in no way intended to limit the historical role of the "foreign element," but to extend it by the exploitation of the latter's "greater mobility" and by linking together the two elements of the American working class.
Engels considered the antagonism between the native-born and the immigrants one of the principal obstacles to the development of a mass party.
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