they confiscated every booze joint, saloon and brewery in the State.. Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis had invested a million dollars of hard earned money in a brand new brewery in Oklahoma City, invested.a million dollars earned in the sweat of their brow, the fruit of their thrift and frugality, the reward of their abstinence, in a legitimate industry, and our good Democrats destroyed all that value, wiped out the whole industry with the scratch of a lead pencil and never offered a wooden nickel as an indemnity to the rightful owners. These good Democrats would not even allow Anheuser-Busch to take their movable property out of the state, for down in the bowels of that brewery were 30,000 barrels of lager beer—cold, foaming lager beer.
Friends, you may appreciate the feelings of a German, like myself, when he writes on a painful subject like that. These Democrats would not allow Anheuser-Busch to take that lager beer up to Kansas, to sell it to the Prohibitionists of that state, but on a hot summer day, they poured that precious liquid in the gutters of Oklahoma City, and the crawdads and the fish were drunk for two weeks afterwards. This is confiscation with a vengeance. This is swiping the other fellow's business and rubbing it into him. And if the time ever should come when we Socialists have to go in the confiscating business, we shall be only too glad to turn the job over to the Republicans and Democrats, for we believe they are past masters in the gentle art of confiscation.
Another Way.
Confiscation is one way of acquiring other people's property, but it may not be the best way. Slavery was abolished in the colonies of England, Portugal and Spain, by paying an indem-
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