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Miscellanea 
tion of degree of criminality. Dr Goring uses the number of convictions per year of freedom 
and number of months imprisoned per year of freedom but since in New York the indeterminate 
sentence is given for hopeful cases instead of a short sentence " number of convictions " was 
used among these delinquent women as a measure of criminality. Dr Goring found frequency of 
conviction associated with the relatively weak-minded but shorter periods of imprisonment, 
while though delinquent women tended in the same direction the values were barely significant. 
Property offenders seem to be more intelligent than offenders against chastity which, if property 
oft'enders includes burglars and thieves, agrees with Dr Goring's conclusions. In discussing wage 
earned and mental capacity those who "live in," chiefly domestic servants, have had to be 
separated from the other groups of employment. Among domestic servants the authors find no 
correlation between mental capacity and wage but they do find a correlation between wage and 
mental capacity among workers other than domestic servants. We can hardly assume however 
that domestic service differs from other occupations in that mental capacity does not vary with 
wage in this occupation while it does in others, since no comparison within one group of occupations 
has been undertaken and except in factory workers the numbers would not be large enough for this 
to be worth doing. There is certainly a correlation between mental capacity and type of occupation 
and between wage and type of occupation and between mental capacity and wage when different 
occupations are considered, but the wage within any one occupation need not necessarily vary 
with intelligence any more than it does with domestic service though we may expect it to do so. 
We have briefly indicated the lines on which this enquiry has proceeded and throughout the 
reading we have been much impressed by the caution with which opinions have been expressed 
and it is therefore the more astonishing to find in the last paragraph that these guarded expres- 
sions of opinion have gone to the winds. We find the sentence "We disagree (i.e. with Dr Goring) 
however in the preeminence attached to such a constitutional factor as defective intelligence in 
contrast with economic factors." We fail to find this disagreement in the text of the book. 
Dr Goring finds that 10 to 20 per cent, of the criminals were feeble minded, the authors of this 
book find 17 per cent, of the delinquent women mentally poorer than the 296 working girls who 
" should make a fairly good average for the whole community." If these working girls are a 
sample of the whole community probably one or two would be feeble minded and all those below 
the worst of these girls in intelligence would certainly be feeble minded and the agreement with 
Dr Goring's estimate is very striking. On p. 244 the authors write " How much of a factor the 
element of poor home conditions is, as causative of delinquency, it is difficult to judge, since we , 
have no similar estimates of the general population." This sentence and the number of feeble 
minded among the delinquent women do not seem to agree with the sentence from the last 
paragraph of the book quoted above. It is true that witiiin the group crime begins at an earlier 
age in the poorer homes but there is no correlation between poor homes and the number of 
convictions. In this connection we might mention that in 1902 when Dr Goring started collect- 
ing his data the work of Binet and Simon had not been published and also that in estimating 
the amount of feeble mindedness in the general pojjulation Dr Goring was guided not only by 
the report of the Royal Commission, as stated in this work, but also bj' a knowledge of the 
number of feeble minded children in the schools of London and Liverpcjol. Personally we prefer 
to draw our conclusions from a study of the book as a whole rather than from the summary and 
that study seems to us to emphasize the necessity of an investigation into the economic con- 
ditions, home environment and mental capacity of a sample of the non-criminal women of New 
York State without which it seems to us no comparison as to the relative importance of consti- 
tutional and environmental factors as determinants of crime can be adequately discussed. It is 
more difficult among these women to obtain an estimate of the amount of criminality owing to 
the existence of the indeterminate sentence than it was among the criminals in England and 
many apparentlj' contradictory facts emerge when the two estimates of criminality, age at first 
conviction and number of convictions, are taken. In every country we need a very full control 
series with which we can compare our special groups and we wish that such an investigation 
could be carried out on the lines followed in this interesting study of women delinquents. 
