Page:Leigh v. Hall.pdf/13

this provision of thirty days publication is in the Amendment No. 7; and its presence is quite commanding. Arkansas originally adopted^[1] the Initiative and Referendum by a Constitutional Amendment in 1909, which is not the present Amendment No. 7. Nowhere in the said 1909 Initiative and Referendum Amendment was there any requirement of thirty days publication before filing. At the General Election in November, 1920 there was adopted by the people our present Amendment No. 7; and in our present Amendment No. 7 there appears, for the first time, the provision requiring the publication of the proposed measure to be thirty days before the filing of the petition. The point I am making is, that this language was put into the amendment deliberately and after we had operated under a previous Initiative and Referendum Amendment for a number of years. So it must have been thought that there should be publication before the proposed petition was filed. The framers of the Constitutional Amendment said thirty days; I cannot make twenty-two days equal thirty days.

In tax sales we have repeatedly held that when a statute states a number of days for publication such provision is mandatory. In McWilliams v. Clampitt, 195 Ark. 908, 115 S.W.2d 280, the statute required the notice to be published weekly for two weeks before the sale. Notice was published on June 1st and June 8th and the sale was held on June 12th. The Court found that the notice was published for only eleven days, and held the sale was, therefore, void. Some of the other tax sale cases holding the time of publication to be mandatory are: Laughlin v. Fisher, 141 Ark. 629, 219 S.W. 199; and Thweatt v. Howard, 68 Ark. 426, 59 S.W. 764. In 82 C.J.S. 235 the general holdings are summarized: "Constitutional and statutory

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1. The 1909 Initiative and Referendum Amendment is listed as Amendment No. 10 to the Constitution and may be found on pages 121 and 122 of Kirby & Castle's Digest of 1916, and on pages 1239 and 1240 of the Acts of the Legislature for the year 1909. It may also be found listed as Amendment No. 7 on pages 131 and 132 of Crawford & Moses' Digest of 1921. To provide procedural matters for the 1909 Amendment, the Arkansas General Assembly of 1911 adopted Act No. 2 of the Extraordinary Session that convened on May 22, 1911 (see pages 582 et seq. of the printed Acts of 1911).