206 Urdahl—The Present Fee System in the United States. 
decided that the charge was not a tax, but was in the nature of 
a rental, or essentially a fee. “A municipal corporation has 
power to impose a reasonable charge upon a company doing 
inter-state business, as a compensation for the space occupied 
by its property.” The court makes no statement as to how the 
size of the fee should be gauged, but it is evident that the 
element of service or benefit is of more importance in this than 
in many previous decisions. 
In some recent decisions there are traces of a decided advance 
in the legal interpretation of fees. The true criterion, as has 
been explained before, by which payments can be judged, as fees 
or taxes, must be the presence or absence of a special benefit to 
the individual equivalent to the charge. The legislative, or law¬ 
making, body has ultimately the discretion and the power to de¬ 
cide whether a charge shall be imposed or not; and in so doing 
it also decides whether it is a counter-payment for a service 
rendered to certain individuals by the state, or whether it is a 
burden in the form of a tax imposed without reference to ser¬ 
vices. The intent of the legislative body becomes, therefore, a 
guiding principle, which has already received recognition both 
by state 1 and federal courts. 2 
The decision in which this is brought out most clearly is in 
the case of Harmon vs. Chicago. i Here the United States Su¬ 
preme Court decided that an ordinance of the city of Chicago 
was invalid which imposed a license fee upon all tugs plying in 
the Chicago River, whether licensed by the United States in 
the coasting trade or not. The charges would have been per¬ 
fectly legitimate, so the court intimated, if they had been im¬ 
posed as a consideration for improvements made in the channel 
of the river, which improvements were of use to the tugs. The 
fact was shown by the attorneys for the defense that such valu¬ 
able improvements had actually been made in the Chicago 
River, but there was nothing in the ordinance to show that the 
city council intended the license fee as a consideration for the 
use of these improvements; on the contrary, there was reason 
to believe that the so-called fees were intended simply as a tax 
1 Mitchell vs. Williams , 27 Ind., 62. 
2 147 U. S., 410. 
