82 
Urdahl—Historical Survey of Fee Systems. 
the direct collection of court fees was displaced by the use of 
stamps. At first they were confined to only a few instruments, 
their cost depending upon the length of the document, as meas¬ 
ured by the number of skins required. In order to protect the 
revenue, however, the number of words to the skin was limited 
by law, and the prolix legal verbiage was not allowed to be cur¬ 
tailed. One of the consequences of this was the abominable 
style of all early legal documents, and its effects may doubtless 
be seen in the legal phraseology of to-day. During the next one 
hundred years the stamp-fee system was extended, not only to all 
official or judicial documents, but also to many semi-official in¬ 
struments, such as bills of exchange, promissory notes, leases, 
mortgages, transfers, and so on. 
The judicial fees made it in the interest of magistrates and 
attorneys to delay and appeal and continue all cases as long as 
possible; and it was thus largely through their influence, that 
the law courts of England became a mere mockery of justice, 
and remained such for centuries. It was on account of the Eng¬ 
lish legal fee-system, perverted by the courts into a system of 
oppression, that Bentham directed his protest against law taxes. 
It was against the iniquities and abuses of this system, that 
Dickens wrote his Bleak House, which opened the eyes of the 
public to the actual condition of the administration of justice. 
F. CONCLUSION. 
Taken as a whole, the evolution of the English license fee- 
system may be said to be as follows: — 
At first regulation was undertaken by the state without any 
charge. Then a system of licenses was required, and a small 
fee was charged for the clerical work of making them out and 
recording. Gradually this fee was increased, sometimes to cor¬ 
respond to the value of the services granted; sometimes it be¬ 
came a tax levied purely for revenue, and, in the end, it 
frequently became so high as to be evaded or even openly op¬ 
posed by the people. The fee was then reduced, either on ac¬ 
count of its unpopularity, or because the point of diminishing 
returns had been reached. Either extreme usually leads to a 
reduction in the size of the fees, and this usually fixes the 
