meager powers, so dwarfed in their stature that they bear but faint resemblance to the more perfect forms of municipalities, should possess authority to mortgage their taxing power so heavily that the interest of the debt could not be fully discharged; that the principal itself must remain forever unpaid.
Especially strong are we in this view when we consider that the same corporations have been given authority to borrow on district bonds a limited sum of money for the very purpose of building school houses. This act provides fully for the payment of the interest on the bonds and the extinction of their principal by the creation of a sinking fund to be derived from a tax of two mills. No means of paying the warrant indebtedness or the interest thereon are designated, and this points strongly against the power to create such an indebtedness. It is true that a tax of five mills may be levied for the purpose, among other things, of discharging any debts of the district lawfully incurred, but only little, if any, of this could ever be available to apply on the interest and principal of such warrants, as this is all the tax there can be levied to furnish the furniture and necessary apparatus for the school house of the district. The language of the supreme court of Wisconsin in Kane v. School-Dist. No. 3, 52 Wis. 502, 9 N. W. Rep. 459, meets our full approval: ‘We entertain very grave doubts whether the board and the voters of the district combined can make a contract payable out of funds not intended to be voted or raised by taxation during the current year, except by taking such proceedings in the particular cases authorized, as are necessary, under the statute, to make a loan in behalf of the district. If they can, then it would be wholly unnecessary to make any loans on behalf of a district, and the district might during any current year incur such an amount of indebtedness, to be charged upon the funds of succeeding years, as to absorb all the taxes which could be lawfully collected in such years, and leave the district wholly without resources, except by a repetition of the same system of mortgaging the future for the necessities of the present. Either this result would follow, or, if such liabilities were held to be debts lawfully incurred by the district, then the tax-payers of the district could be compelled to raise the neces-
