Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 1).pdf/217

gument on the part of the relator that this refers only to such a vacancy as may exist after the office has been once filled by election; and in this connection we are referred to § 1385 of the Compiled Laws, which enumerates the events. which cause vacancies in the office, and it is urged that this section is a legislative definition of the word “vacancy,” and that the legislature must be presumed to have used it in the sense of this definition when they employed it inthe revenue law. How it can be said that that section is a definition of the word it is difficult to understand. Its full scope is the statement of causes which will create vacancy. It does not purport to exclude all other causes. Certainly, the legislature may provide that a vacancy in fact shall, in contemplation of law, be a vacancy to be filled in a manner prescribed. While we hold in mind the statute enumerating the cases in which a vacancy may exist, we must not lose sight of the fact that the legislature intended, as is shown by the emergency clause, that the revenue law should take effect in time to make it possible for the tax proceedings for 1890 to be initiated under its provisions. They intended that all of its machinery should go into immediate operation; that the assessors whose offices it created should make the assessment under it for this year. It was with this design before them that they provided for the filling of the vacancy in that office, knowing that if the district assessor was to make the assessment there would be a vacancy in the office until it could be filled by election in the fall. It was such a vacancy, as well as the vacancy which might after election be created under the statute, that the legislature referred to when they declared that any vacancy might be filled by the county commissioners. This interpretation respects the will of the legislature, evinced by the emergency clause, that the new system should go into effect in time to permit all the tax proceedings for 1890, from the first steps of assessment, to be taken under that act; and it would be a strained construction to hold that the initiation of the tax proceedings under that system was to be left to an officer acting under the old system, when by prescribing the manner of filling a vacancy the legislature had made it possible to fill the new office it had thus created in time for the officers so appointed to