I 
66 Urdahl—Historical Survey of Fee Systems. 
lowed to retain a certain per centum of all fees collected by him, 
so as to insure the rigid enforcement of the law . 1 There are a 
large number of services which are of so heterogeneous a char¬ 
acter that it is impossible to classify them definitely. In such 
cases direct collection is absolutely necessary. 
The indirect method of collection has become extremely im¬ 
portant in most civilized countries of to-day. This is by means 
of stamps. It must be evident at the very outset that all stamps 
are not fees. The very term “ stamp-tax, ” with which we are 
familiar, indicates that something more than fees has often been 
collected. The collection of taxes and fees by means of stamps 
is said to have originated in Holland, when that country was in 
the midst of its war with Spain ; 2 and it was soon introduced into 
nearly every country in Europe. At present nearly every civi¬ 
lized country obtains considerable revenue in this way. These 
receipts include both fees and taxes which have the common 
property, that they can be conveniently collected by means of 
stamps. The advantages are, that elaborate computation by 
the officials is done away with; and the complicated system of 
book-keeping which this necessitated, is avoided. They are 
economical both to the government and the public. To the lat¬ 
ter, they save all the trouble and the time which a visit to a 
public official would involve. The computation and payment of 
stamps must be done by the public, and is therefore, as Roscher 
says, “ a kind of self-government ”; but it is also accompanied 
by the disadvantages of self-government, in that it requires an 
1 The political corruption which this method of collecting fees has re¬ 
sulted in, will be treated of subsequently. 
2 In 1624 the authorities of Holland offered a prize of a certain sum of 
money to anyone who should provide a scheme for a new system of taxa¬ 
tion. The prize was awarded to the originator of stamps. Fouquet, dur¬ 
ing the Fronde troubles in 1651, introduced stamp-taxes in France, and the 
system was still further extended by Colbert in 1693. Denmark levied a 
stamp-tax in Schleswig-Holstein in 1657 and introduced it in the home 
country in 1660. Prussia learned to make use of the new tax in 1686, and 
England followed in 1694, with a general stamp act which took the place 
of the law imposing court fees. Russia, in 1699, was the last to adopt it. 
Roscher, System der Finanzwissenschaft, p. 110; Stengel, W6rter - 
bueh der deutschen Verwaltungslehre, II, 544. 
