Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 2).pdf/303

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EDMONDS ET AL. v HERBRANDSON ET AL.
277

those in which the others should apply, it would hardly be questioned that the legislation was special, and not general and uniform in its operation throughout the state. But the counties were, at the date of the act, identified, and their status fixed for all time by reference to the specified event as fully as though the counties were named. There is nothing in the event which is the basis of classification which suggests any necessity or propriety for a different rule to be applied to the counties to be placed in the two classes. Why one county which had located its county seat by a vote of its electors, twenty-five years or six months before the act passed, should require a vote of three-fifths of its electors to remove it, and the county which should so locate it three or six months after the act passed may again remove or locate it upon a mere majority vote, is impossible to conceive, except that the legislature has arbitrarily so provided. But in such matters the legislature cannot arbitrarily so provide. The act is unconstitutional and void.” In Marmet v. State, 45 Ohio St. 63, 12 N. E. Rep. 463, the same doctrine is clearly stated and recognized: ‘The law is not a special act. It is local and special as to the ends to be accomplished, but general in its terms and operations, applying to all cities of the first grade of the first class. It is not limited to such city as may have been in that class and grade at the date of its enactment. At that time Cincinnati was the only city in the state answering to the description, but there is a possibility, not to say certainty, that other cities in the state will increase in population so that they will pass into this grade, and when that happens they will come within the provisions of this law. In this respect the law differs essentially from that in review in the case of State v. Mitchell, 31 Ohio St. 592. That law was made applicable only to cities of the second class having a population of 31,000 at the last federal census, and inasmuch as Columbus was the only city in the state having that population, and as the act could apply only to that city and never to any other, and as it undertook to confer corporate powers, this court held it to be in conflict with § 1 of article 13, and there-fore void. A like objection was found to exist against the act under consideration in the case of State v. Pugh, 43 Ohio St.