Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 2).pdf/188

 actual notice; and, as the law provided for no notice of such a belated opportunity for a hearing, actual notice would not have made it his duty to be present at a pretended meeting of the board when it had no power to organize as a board of equalization. Even assuming actual notice, and that this would be sufficient, yet there was no opportunity for hearing, because the board of equalization never met at all. It assumed to meet at a time when its powers to initiate a session had expired. To hold that the provision of the law as to the time when the board should assemble to hear complaints is merely directory strikes at the very substance of the citizen’s constitutional right to a hearing. He is denied a hearing if the board at its own pleasure or caprice may assemble at any other time without notice of its meeting, for to require him and all other citizens to dance daily attendance at the place fixed by law for the meeting, until, after the lapse of a month or two, the board should see fit to convene, would be a doctrine grotesque in its absurdity, monstrous in its injustice, and subversive alike of the spirit and of the letter of the law.

As has been before stated, a loose notion appears to prevail in some jurisdictions upon this subject of the validity of a tax in equity. It cannot be doubted that where there is a valid tax no mere irregularities in subsequent procedure will destroy it, and of course equity should insist upon or demand its payment where the citizen appeals to equity for relief. But there must be a valid tax. Equity has no power to levy a tax or make an assessment, and there is no other than the statutory procedure recognized by the law by which the share of the public burden to be borne by any citizen can be determined. It is illogical for a court of equity to decree the payment of what it terms the suitor’s fair proportion of the taxes to be collected, where the proceedings by which alone that fair share can be determined are defective in those statutory requirements in which are bound up the constitutional rights of the citizen. There can be no tax in law or in equity where there are omissions of such a nature in the proceedings to create a tax, if the constitution is to continue to shield the citizen in the enjoyment of his property against arbitrary exactions under the