Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 1).pdf/43

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N. DAK. EX REL., OHLQUIST v. SWAN, AS SHERIFF.
19

and there is no action known to the law by which any private party could enforce its provisions. Those provisions can be enforced only by penalties for their violation,—penalties prescribed by the legislative power of the state. If such penalties do not exist, then article 20 is barren of the elements of a complete law, and, while prohibitory in form, is in fact simply a declaration of principles. In this connection we must briefly notice respondent’s position. He is sustained by the Kansas Prohibition Cases, 24 Kan. 700. We will not stop to refine upon the differences between the Kansas prohibition clause and our own; but we hold that, if article 20 of our constitution be self-executing, then chapter 26, Laws 1879, falls in its entirety. This is in accord with the clear weight of authorities. See U. S. v. Tynen, supra; Fraser v. Alexander, supra; State v. Tonks, supra; and also, as very pertinent to this point, see comments of Justice Brewer in the Kansas Prohibition Cases, page 724. The whole scope and purpose of said chapter 26 was to provide a license law for selling intoxicants as a beverage. It is idle to say that such law would have been enacted to authorize such sales for medicinal, sacramental, and scientific purposes, and still more idle to say that the penalties would have been inflicted for such sales without license. Chapter 26 must all stand or all fall. It falls, if article 20 be self-executing. But to say that that article receives life through the penalties in said chapter 26, immediately destroys those penalties, and leaves the prohibition powerless of enforcement. Another and all-sufficient reason why we cannot attach such penalties to article 20 is that it was never so intended by the constitution makers. They expressly provided that future legislation should provide the regulations for the enforcement, and penalties for the violation, of said article. That intention must be respected. It follows that said article is not self-executing, no common-law or statutory provision existing for its enforcement, hence it remains dormant, as a restriction upon the citizens, until given life by subsequent legislation, and has no force as a repealing measure, and chapter 26 of the Laws of 1879 stands in its entirety.

We must not be understood to hold that article 20 does not