Criticism, however, was not silent. There was an uneasy feeling in the public mind that too much importance had been attached to the principle of "uniformity," which was held to be responsible for the alleged evils of the system then in force, _i.e._, the want of "individualisation" of the prisoner, and the stifling of local control. This feeling found an echo in the Press; not only were the principles of prison treatment, as prescribed by the Prison Acts, criticised, but the prison authority itself, and the constitution of that authority, were held to be responsible for many grave evils. It was contended that centralization only fostered bureaucracy, and that the Prison System of the Country was at the mercy of a single bureaucrat, the Chairman of the Prison Board. It was impossible for the Government of the day to ignore this fierce indictment. A Committee of Inquiry was appointed, under the Chairmanship of Mr. H. Gladstone, M.P., then Parliamentary Under Secretary for Home Affairs. The Report was published in April, 1895, just at the time that Sir E. Du Cane was retiring from the Service, he having attained the age of sixty-five, the age for retirement under the Superannuation Acts. The Report, resulting from a keen and exhaustive inquiry into every branch of prison administration, marks a distinct epoch in the Prison history of this country. It paid a high tribute of praise to the Prison Commissioners and their late Chairman, by its formal declaration that the centralization of authority had been a complete success in the direction of uniformity, discipline, and economy. But while admitting this, and the attention that had been given to organization, finance, order, sanitation, and statistics, it gave some justification for the popular belief that centralization had been carried too far, and that local interest and authority had been unduly suppressed; and to use the words of the Report (which constitute the real gravamen of charge against the prison authority) "that prisoners have been treated too much as a hopeless or worthless element of the community, and that the moral as well as the legal responsibility of the prison authorities has been held to cease when they pass outside the prison gates." These words may be said to mark the passage from the old to the new methods of punishment, and from those which rested upon severity and repression to those which looked more hopefully towards the possible reformation of persons committed to prison.