Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 3).pdf/242

 W. Rep. 946; Bank v. Bates, 120 U. S. 556, 562, 7 Sup. Ct. Rep. 679. If the word “creditors” is to have its widest significance, then no chattel mortgage can ever be valid as against the creditors of the mortgagor unless it is filed simultaneously with its execution. If, when the mortgagee hurries to the proper office to file his security, he is to be deprived of its protection because a creditor, intermediate its execution and its filing, has seized the mortgaged property under attachment, it must be because the creditor so seizing it is a “creditor,” within the meaning of the statute. He is not such because he has seized the property before the filing of the mortgage. This element, as we have seen, is entirely unimportant. The fact of levy prior to the filing of the mortgage has no bearing upon the question whether he is such a creditor as the statute protects. We must therefore eliminate this element from our consideration. He would be a creditor within the law just the same although he should not secure a levy on the property until after the filing of the mortgage. If, then, the mortgage is void as to him when he seizes it five minutes after the execution and before the filing of the mortgage, it is void as to him without such previous seizure. He may seize the property after the mortgage is filed, and then insist that he is a “creditor,” within the law, just as fully as when the seizure is made before the filing of the instrument. That the fact whether the seizure is or is not before the filing of the mortgage is of no moment in determining whether the person is a creditor within the law is made apparent from the silence of the law as to this fact, in connection with the injustice and absurdity of such an interpretation of the law. If the date of seizure is controlling, a creditor whose claim antedates the execution of the mortgage, and who therefore extended no credit while the mortgage was withheld from record, could destroy a mortgage filed one minute after the execution thereof by seizing the mortgaged property after the mortgage had been delivered, but before it could be filed, no matter how great the diligence of the mortgagee in filing it, and despite the fact that he parted with value on the