by such person, until the tax is fully paid.” On April 14, 1890, Foster county furnished the mortgagor, King, seed wheat for the season of 1890, to be sown upon this same land. It was so sown. The county claims a lien upon the land for the value of this seed, under the provisions of chapter 152 of the Laws of 1890. No question is raised as to the existence of liens on the land for the seed wheat furnished in 1889 and 1890. The only inquiry is whether such liens are paramount to that of the mortgage, which was executed and became a lien upon the land more than two years before the first law was enacted. It is unnecessary to refer to the provisions of the act of 1890, as the law of 1889 confers upon the county greater rights than are conferred upon it by the act of 1890, the lien being in express terms declared to be a first lien under the statute of 1889, while the act of 1890 is silent on this subject of priority. Having reached the conclusion that the provision of the act of 1889, giving priority to the seed lien, cannot, in the face of the inhibition against the.impairment by a state of the obligations of a contract, work the destruction or impairment of a prior subsisting lien, created before the act of 1889 was passed, it is, of course, unnecessary to determine whether the act of 1890 does or does not attempt to make the seed lien paramount. The statute which makes the lien a first lien upon the land describes it as a tax lien, and the amount due for the seed grain is declared to be a tax, and the amount thereof, in case of default in its payment, is directed to be entered upon the tax list of the county. But the voice of the legislature cannot alter the essential nature of things. No legislative fiat can make that a tax which is not and cannot be a tax. If the law-making power were vested with unlimited authority to fix the meaning of words, to take cases without the prohibition of the constitution by arbitrary definitions, the fundamental rights of the citizen would be safe only so long as the legislature should abstain from defining away constitutional protections. Due process of law might be defined to embrace arbitrary confiscation; such a thing as an ex post facto statute might be defined practically out of existence; and many, if not all, of the barriers erected to shield the fundamental rights of the citizen from legislative
