The significance of the relation of these external influences upon the degree of _recidivism_ is not directly comparable with the influence of these factors upon the tendency to be convicted or not to be convicted of crime at all, as he carefully explains. Since the distribution of the above factors in the population at large is not known, the relationship to criminality in general could not be measured for the outer factors as it was for the inner factors discussed previously. Reserving, then, our judgment as to how closely these environmental factors may be related to the criminal tendency not represented by recidivism, we can reach important conclusions as to their relation to the degree of recidivism. Only one of the coefficients was found to be large enough to be twice its probable error, so that as a whole they were not at all significant. He summarizes his conclusions as follows: “The relative values of these contrasted coefficients demonstrate effectively and conclusively one truth: that an adverse environment is related much more intimately to the intelligence of the convicts than it is to the degree of their recidivism, or to the nature of the crimes they commit. Moreover, since mental defectiveness is closely related to crime, an easily imagined corollary to this truth is that the mental defectiveness of the convict is antecedent to his environmental misfortunes, rather than that his unfortunate circumstances have been responsible for the mental defectiveness of the convict, and his lapse into crime....” “From the general trend of the results tabulated above, our interim conclusion is that, relatively to its origin in the constitution of the malefactor, and especially in his mentally defective constitution, crime in this country is only to a trifling extent (if to any) the product of social inequality, or of adverse environment, or of other manifestations of what may be comprehensively termed 'the force of circumstances'” (_20_, p. 287-288).