The same system prevailed at Bodmin, Bedford, Chester, Mold, Chelmsford, Maidstone, Coldbath Fields, Holloway, Lewes, and Warwick. Manchester had an agent paid by commission for the purchase of stores, and the sale of manufactured articles. The Governor of Hereford received ten per cent. on the net profits arising from the sale of the manufactured goods, and the assistant turnkey had an extra allowance of three shillings a week for acting as trade instructor. Then Kirkdale, Strangeways, Leeds, Lewes, and many other prisons were furnished, in addition to the ordinary disciplinary staff, with trade officers, whose duty it was to instruct the prisoners in the various industries carried on. All this was altered when the Government assumed the complete control of all Local prisons in England and Wales on the 1st of April 1878. In connection with the strict and uniform system of discipline which was introduced into every department of the Service, the granting of allowances to officers and the payment of rewards to prisoners were abolished, and in lieu of these rewards, the gratuity system, which is explained in another chapter, was introduced. The actual industries on which prisoners were employed remained much the same, except that, later on, matmaking, which had been one of the principal Prison industries, employing a daily average of nearly 3,000 workers, had to be almost abandoned in consequence of an agitation which had commenced in 1872 on the part of outside workmen, who complained that the competition of Prison labour was seriously affecting their trade. About this date, the oakum trade, on which the prisons throughout the country had been able to rely for employment for many generations, collapsed owing to the substitution of iron and steel for wood in the building of ships. This industry employed between 3,000 and 4,000 prisoners, mostly those under sentences then considered too short to admit of the teaching of any trade. At the same time, the Act of 1877 reduced the period of hard or penal labour to one month in the case of those sentenced to hard labour. A larger body of prisoners thus became eligible for the ordinary industrial employment of the Prison, but these employments were still carried on in separation, and it was not till twenty years later that the principle of associated labour in local prisons was recognized and adopted. The public inquiry of 1894 into Prison Administration was a practical condemnation of the separate or cellular system except for short periods. It swept aside the old-fashioned idea that separate confinement was desirable on the ground that it enables the prisoner to meditate on his misdeeds. It held that association for industrial labour under proper conditions could be productive of no harm, and this view was supported by the fact that association for work on a large scale had always been the practice at the Convict Prisons without being productive of dangerous