40. As for the schools and churches, we know that society must pay for and keep up its own conservative institutions. They cost capital and do not pay back capital directly, although they do indirectly, and in the course of time, in ways which we could trace out and verify if that were our subject. Here, then, we have a second class of institutions.
41. But the factories and farms and foundries are the productive institutions which must provide the support of these consuming institutions. If the factories, etc., put themselves on a line with the poorhouses, or even with the schools, what is to support them and all the rest too? They have nothing behind them. If in any measure or way they turn into burdens and objects of care and protection, they can plainly do it only by part of them turning upon the other part, and this latter part will have to bear the burden of all the consuming institutions, _including the consuming industries_. For a protected factory is not a producing industry. _It is a consuming industry!_ If a factory is (as the protectionist alleges) a triumph of the tariff, that is, if it would not be but for the tariff (and otherwise he has nothing to do with it), then it is not producing; it is consuming. It is a burden to be borne. _The bigger it is the sadder it is._
42. If a protectionist shows me a woolen mill and challenges me to deny that it is a great and valuable industry, I ask him whether it is due to the tariff. If he says “no,” then I will assume that it is an independent and profitable establishment, but in that case it is out of this discussion as much as a farm or a doctor’s practice. If he says “yes,” then I answer that the mill is not an industry at all. We pay sixty per cent tax on cloth _simply in order that that mill may be_. It is not an institution for getting us cloth, for if we went into the market with the same products which we take there now and if there were no woolen mill, we should get all the cloth we want. The mill is simply _an institution for making cloth cost per yard sixty per cent more of our products than it otherwise would_. That is the one and only function which the mill has added, by its existence, to the situation. I have called such a factory a “nuisance.” The word has been objected to. The word is of no consequence. He who, when he goes into a debate, begins to whine and cry as soon as the blows get sharp, should learn to keep out. What I meant was this: A nuisance is something which by its existence and presence in society works loss and damage to the society--works against the general interest, not for it. A factory which gets in the way and hinders us from attaining the comforts which we are all trying to get--which makes harder the terms of acquisition when we are all the time struggling by our arts and sciences to make those terms easier--is a harmful thing, and noxious to the common interest.