Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 2).pdf/411

 engaged in agriculture. The larger proportion of such products must pass beyond the bounds of the territory to find a market. The purely internal shipments would be trifling in amount. But few of the other necessaries, and absolutely none of the luxuries, came from within our borders. Nor must we ignore the fact that the plaintiffs road was known to be one of the great arteries of the nation’s business life, through which flowed and was destined to flow a current of strength and volume, not only of the nation’s commerce within itself, but of the nation’s commerce with foreign lands. With these facts before them, the legislature have declared their intention to tax the local gross earnings not only of local traffic, but also of transportation from points without to points within, from points within to points without, and wholly across the territory from and to points without; and that for such tax they granted the exemption. Shall we hold that they granted it for less, nay, for a pittance, in comparison with the tax they designated as the price? “If the parts of a statute are so mutually connected with and dependent upon each other as conditions, considerations, or compensations for each other as to warrant the belief that the legislature intended them as a whole, and that, if all could not be carried into effect, the legislature would not have passed the residue independently, then, if some parts are unconstitutional, all the provisions which are thus dependent, conditional, or connected must fall with them.” Cooley, Const. Lim. (5th Ed.) 213, 214, and cases cited; Meyer v. Berlandi, 39 Minn. 438, 40 N. W. Rep. 513; O’Brien v. Kreuz, 36 Minn. 136, 30 N. W. Rep. 458; Allen v. City of Louisiana, 103 U. S. 80; State v. Denny, 118 Ind. 449, 21 N. E. Rep. 274; Utsy v. Hiott, 30 S. C. 360, 9 S. E. Rep. 338; State v. Harris, 19 Nev. 222, 8 Pac. Rep. 462. In Lathrop v. Mills, 19 Cal. 530, the court said: “In order to sustain the excepted clause, we must intend that the legislature, knowing that the other provisions of the statute would fall, still willed that this particular section would stand as the law of the land.” See, also, Baldwin v. Franks, 120 U. 8. 678, 7 Sup. Ct. Rep. 656, 763. I therefore hold that the gross earnings law of 1883 is void in its entire scope for the reasons already stated.