At the same time, two principal features of our prison system--Separate Confinement and Hard Labour--began to assume a definite shape at this period, which has been retained, subject to modification, until the present day. The duration of the period of Separate Confinement, and the regulation of the task of hard labour, consistently with cellular confinement, remained the problem of prison administration for many years, and cannot yet be said to be finally settled. There will be found running through all this period an earnest attempt to reconcile the claims of the two admitted objects of imprisonment, _viz_:--deterrence and reform. On the one hand there was strict separation, and on the other hand it was ordained that provision should be made in every prison for enforcing sentences of hard labour as enjoined by the Act of 1823, although that Act, as already stated, did not contemplate separate confinement, but a system of associated labour, and the word "Hard Labour" only assumed its narrow and technical meaning when the advocates of the Separate System, as the means of reformation, were unwilling altogether to lose sight of the necessity for some deterrence in the shape of hard work. The question thus arose, and was warmly agitated, as to how hard labour could be adapted to the cellular system, and we find great ingenuity expended in devising forms of labour, such as cranks and treadwheels, in which each prisoner occupied a separate compartment. These particular forms of labour were recognized as "hard labour" _par excellence_, and as necessary for the due punishment of the offender, consistently with his occupation of a separate cell by day and night. With these problems unsettled: with a strange and general ignorance of the true principles of punishment: with conflicting views and diverse authorities, it is not to be wondered at that, during the following years, our Local Prison System was in a very confused and chaotic state, although nominally professing adhesion to prescribed principles, until inquiry made by Committees of the House of Commons and House of Lords, respectively, into the state of Local Prisons, in 1850 and 1863, led practically to the modern Prison System.