By far the most important of the dissentient voices was that of Sir Alexander Cockburn, the Lord Chief Justice, who appended to the report a long memorandum giving his reasons for not concurring in it. After a careful perusal of this memorandum any one would, I think, be ready to concede that the Lord Chief Justice was nearer the mark than his colleagues. They hesitated to admit that the penal system was entirely defective. Sir Alexander Cockburn had no doubt of it, and maintained that the same impression was pretty generally abroad. But if there were faults in it, said the commissioners, then the administration of the law was to blame; it was too lenient. To this the Lord Chief Justice would by no means agree. The leniency of the judges, as it had shown itself of late, was nothing. "The spirit in which the law is administered," he observed, "is not the growth of yesterday. It has arisen gradually out of the more humane and merciful disposition of men's minds in modern times, whereby punishments inflicted without scruple in former days would now be regarded as cruel and inhuman." No; the inefficacy of penal servitude did not lie in the shortness or inequality of sentences, but in the manner in which the punishment was inflicted. "Moderate labour, ample diet, substantial gratuities," he maintained, "are hardly calculated to produce on the mind of the criminal that salutary dread of the recurrence of the punishment which may be the means of deterring him, and, through his example, others from the commission of crime."