Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 2).pdf/370

 sooner the value of the stock will reach par, and the sooner the stated payments on account of stock subscriptions will cease. Endlich on Building Associations, at page 161, says: ‘If we consider the reasons which may be assumed to have guided legislatures in conferring upon building associations the extraordinary privileges and immunities which they enjoy, it will be readily understood (and there van be no other apology for it) that at the bottom of it all is a motive of public policy. The primary design of building associations is to encourage the acquisition of real estate, the building of dwellings, the ownership of homesteads, to increase the proportion of property holders among that class of the population whose slow and Jaborious earnings are, by reason of their pettiness, most fugitive, and generally spent before they reach a sum of sufficient magnitude to back a desire for those guaranties of good citizenship which the policy of our law has always found in landed property. That is the class for whose benefits building associations were originally devised, from among whose numbers their membership was, and for the most part still is, drawn; and all the incidents of membership were designed to accomodate their necessities, and intended to serve their purposes.’ The legislature of Dakota territory (§ 3, c. 41, Laws 1889) used the following language: ‘As building and loan corporations are aggregations of laborers, mechanics, workmen, and working women, which start without any paid up capital, and as these members pay only each month an assessment in proportion to shares, for the purpose of furnishing a home to each of its members in turn, which assessment stops the moment that every member has thus been furnished with such a home, these associations are hereby declared to be benevolent institutions within the meaning of § 2, c. 28, of the Political Code of 1877.’ Rev. Laws. It is at once apparent that the transactions of these associations are separated by essential differences from the ordinary loaning business. * * * It seems very clear to us that the operations of building and loan associations, when confined to their own members, differ so radically from ordinary loan transactions that the legislature was clearly warranted in placing such transactions in a separate class for the purposes of