116 Urdahl—Historical Survey of Fee Systems. 
grain, gaugers of casks, inspectors of provisions of various 
kinds, were intended to facilitate exchanges rather than to check 
them, to stimulate and increase public and private credit, by- 
furnishing greater stability to their standard of deferred pay¬ 
ments, and, finally, to insure certainty regarding quantity and 
quality of the income of the public treasury. 
It may perhaps not be evident at first sight, that there is a 
vital relation between this inspection legislation and the fee 
system. It was the fee system which made all this legislation 
possible. These inspectors were invariable paid by means 
of fees. According to some statutes half was collected from the 
buyer, and half from the seller, while in other colonies the seller 
was forced to bear the whole expense. This office became in 
some places quite lucrative, especially in rapidly growing cen¬ 
ters of population. The number of commodities requiring inspec¬ 
tion were also multiplied, resulting very often in a proportional 
increase in the number of inspectors, until at last we find every 
town supplied with one or more officials of this kind. 1 These 
inspectors, as has already been intimated, were very often paid 
by a certain allowance of the commodity inspected, and even 
when the fee was reckoned in money, it was often commuted or 
paid in produce. At first, therefore, it was quite customary for 
the inspectors to carry on a trade in the product inspected. 
This naturally opened the door for unscrupulous officials to en¬ 
rich themselves, by means of ail sorts of frauds and deceptions, 
both in inspecting the commodities of others and in marking 
their own produce. To prevent these evils laws soon appeared 
forbidding, under heavy penalties, any inspector to trade in the 
commodity which he inspected. Many other regulations were 
also enacted to put an end to this prevalent malfeasance of office. 
F. MISCELLANEOUS FEES. 
Pilots were found to be necessary long before the colonies had 
developed any commerce of their own; in fact, they were all the 
more necessary in the early period, before the bays and channels 
had been thoroughly sounded and the navigable waters explored. 
1 Colonial Laws , Mass., p. 170. 
