Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 2).pdf/302

 be governed by more stringent legislation in this respect, there is no reason why a county in which for the first time such a condition exists on a later day should be excluded from this separate class, any more than a county in which this condition existed the day before. There is no natural reason for a classification of counties in which the same conditions exist, based solely on and arbitrarily upon the period of time before or after which such conditions existed for the first time. Such a doctrine would lead inevitably to unlimited special legislation under the mere guise of classification. It would nulify the constitution so far as it prohibited special legislation. The authorities are unanimous on the point. In Com. v. Patton, 88 Pa. St. 258, the court say: “Said act makes no provision for the future, in which respect it differs from the act of 1874, which in express terms provides for the future cities and the expanding growth of those now inexistence. That is not classification which merely designates one county in the common-wealth, and contains no provision by which any other county may, by reason of its increase of population in the future, come within the class.” In State v. Donovan, 20 Nev. 75, 15 Pac. Rep. 783, the court say: “All acts or parts of acts, attempting to create a classification of counties or cities by a voting population, which are confined in their operation to the existing state of facts at the time of their passage, or to any fixed date prior thereto, or which by any devise or subterfuge exclude the other counties or cities from ever coming within their provisions, or based upon any classification which in relation to the subject embraced in the act is purely illusory, or founded upon unreasonable, odious, or absurd distinctions, have always been held unconstitutional and void.”

Nichols v. Walter, 37 Minn. 264, 33 N. W. Rep. 800, is peculiarly in point. The court said: “Recurring to the law in question, we find it divides the counties in two classes, the classification based upon an event in the past so that no county in one class can ever pass into the other class; and to those in one class is applied what we may call the majority rule, and to those in the other the three-fifths rule. Had the act specified by name those counties in which one rule should apply, and