Theory of Fees. 
51 
his first edition, defines fees as “receipts of the state for ac¬ 
tivity in the special interest of individuals. ” Both Rau and 
Stein, as is evident from their definitions, did not consider re¬ 
galia, (payments for lucrative prerogatives), as fees, but placed 
them in a distinct category. Stein, however, in his last edi¬ 
tion concedes that the regalia are a part of the fee system, but 
holds that they form a class of fees by themselves, entirely 
distinct. 1 
Roscher 2 defines fees as “payments for individual govern¬ 
mental acts by the individuals who were indirectly the cause of 
the act. ” And he limits this definition by holding that only 
such acts are governmental as are done for essential state pur¬ 
poses ■, that is, in the interest of law and sovereignty; and, fur¬ 
thermore, only such payments are fees as do not exceed, at least 
not greatly, the cost to the government of the services 
rendered. 
Schall 3 asserts that the distinguishing feature of fees is that 
they are connected only with those official acts which are per¬ 
formed for the realization of the essential state purposes, and 
that the payments by the fee-payers must be gauged by the 
value of the services of the public courts or officials. There is 
thus a new element introduced, that of making the size of the 
fee proportional to the service rendered by the government. 
Stein, Rau, and Roscher asserted that the fees should be meas¬ 
ured by the cost , or expense , which the official act, in the inter¬ 
est of the individual, caused the government; and that the 
payment became a tax in so far as it exceeded this cost. 
Another element in Schall’s conception is that the quality of the 
official act determines whether the payment is a fee or not. 
Wagner 4 says a fee is a “charge arbitrarily fixed in amount 
Pfeiffer, I, 295, Staatseinnahmen , says that “fees are collected 
from individuals for special benefits from those state institutions which 
the state would be obliged to maintain even if no revenue were derived 
from them, thus excluding all industries managed or established by the 
government for the sake of industrial profit.” 
2 Roscher, Finanzwissenschaft. Third ed., 98. 
3 Schonberg, Handbuch , III, 105. 
4 Finanzwissenschaft, II, 35. 
