The Territory, ex rel. McKinnis, v. Hand.
Chapter 21 only authorized the governor to appoint three commissioners, who, after having qualified, should appoint all the other officers. These provisions to which we have referred, together with the one requiring justices of the peace to be chosen at a special election, are the only departures of importance from the general law governing the organization of new counties, found in this special act. Now coming back to section 6, chapter 42, where it provides that the appointees of the governor "shall hold their offices respectively until their successors shall be elected and qualified according to law," we are met with the question, what law is referred to? If this special act had stopped with section 5, could there have been any question as to when their successors would have been elected? Certainly not. Sections 2 and 3, chapter 21, provides that the commissioners appointed by the governor and the officers appointed by them "shall hold their office until the first general election thereafter, and until their successors shall be elected and qualified." The officers of Lawrence county were appointed and qualified in the spring of 1877; the "first general election thereafter " occurred on the Tuesday next after the first Monday of November, 1877. (Section 2, chapter 27, Political Code.) Reading these statutes together, can there be any doubt as to the proper construction? Why attempt to make these counties an exception to the well settled rule fixed by legislation governing the period for which persons hold under appointment to an elective office? As we have seen, under the general law relating to the organization of new counties, the officers appointed hold only until the next general election; and section 11, chapter 22, Political Code, provides that appointments to fill vacancies must be made to continue until the next general election and until a successor is elected and qualified; and my attention has not been called to any provision authorizing an appointment to an elective office to extend beyond the next general election, when the people may choose for themselves. We do not say this could not be done by appropriate legislation, but we say it has not, and courts should not, by a forced and strained construction in antagonism to the spirit and letter of general statutes, and the well
