disorder of Norfolk Island. That the convicts were thus insolent and insubordinate was undoubtedly due to the petting and pampering they received. But another cause was the unsettled, dissatisfied spirit evoked by several successive alterations in the law--alterations which it was absolutely necessary to make, but which none the less produced unevenness of treatment between various classes of prisoners. The net result was stated in the report, to the effect that the system was clearly not sufficiently dreaded by those who had undergone it, or by the criminal classes in general. The number of re-convictions, they thought, proved this; moreover, the report continues, "the accounts given of penal servitude by discharged convicts, and the fact that they generally come back so soon to their original haunts, tends to prevent its being regarded with fear by their associates. Indeed, in some (though doubtless exceptional) cases, crimes have been committed for the sole purpose of obtaining the advantages which the offenders have supposed a sentence of penal servitude to confer." The system therefore stood condemned, and the commissioners attributed its shortcomings in a minor degree to defects in the discipline maintained, but thought the blame lay really in the shortness of the terms of imprisonment awarded in the courts of law. To speak first of the latter point: the commissioners reported that there had been a notable reduction for some years previous in the length of sentences, and to make them still lighter a remission of time was granted under the new rules. It was a curious fact that the recent increase of crime had corresponded in point of date with the discharge of prisoners who were first sentenced for short terms under the Act of 1857, and was probably mainly attributable to their release from custody. They had come out unchastened. "The discipline to which convicts are subjected," declared the commission, "does not produce its proper effect in short periods of punishment."