In this complex diathesis which means greater susceptibility to temptations, there is little doubt that mental deficiency is the main factor. Aschaffenburg has well expressed one effect of this particular causal factor: “The weak-minded are generally children of the moment.... The lessons of experience, which serve normal persons as a guide, in later events, soon fade, be cause they cannot be fitted into the existing condition of the ideas. The inability to understand, much less to form general points of view, is the direct result of mental weakness” (_20_, p. 180). Lacking the ability to organize their experience, fixed punishments have little restraining influence. Only prolonged training and supervision can save them from being the victims of the moment. Even the large majority above the grade of ability which would justify indefinite supervision still show their stupidity in the offenses they commit. Goring gives an instance of a watch repairer who was legally punished nine times for pawning watches entrusted to him to repair. Who would doubt that native stupidity is an important cause of the recidivism which is so common a criticism of our present forms of legal discipline? It is stated, for example, that 10,000 of those convicted in one year in England had been convicted more than twenty times before (_165_, p. 59). Even with school punishments the same association of bad conduct and stupidity holds. Kemsies has shown, as quoted by Terman, that the 16% ranking lowest in a group of pupils received 80% of the punishments, while the brightest third received almost none (_194_). That the criminal diathesis is not limited to mental deficiency is demonstrated by Goring's results. He shows its smaller correlation with deficient physical size, alcoholism and suicidal tendency with such pathological conditions as insanity and epilepsy, independent of their relations to mental deficiency. In this connection Gruhle's opinion that the hereditary tendency to crime was greater among his non-defective families may be borne in mind.