It is useless, or worse than useless, to occupy ourselves with methods for improving the treatment of criminals, so long as the conditions of life render the prison a welcome and desired shelter. So long as we foster the growth of the reckless classes we foster the growth of criminality. So long as there are a large body of women in the East of London, and in other large centres, who are prepared to say: “It’s Jack the Ripper or the bridge with me. What’s the odds?”[118] there will be a still larger number of persons who will willingly accept the risks of prison. “What’s the odds?” Liberty is dear to every man who is fed and clothed and housed, and he will not usually enter a career of crime unless he has carefully calculated the risks of losing his liberty and found them small; but food and shelter are even more precious than liberty, and these may be secured in a prison. As things are, the asylum and the workhouse, against which there is a deep prejudice, ingrained and irrational, would have a greater deterring influence than the prison. There are every morning at Paris 50,000 persons who do not know how they will eat or where they will sleep.[119] It is the same in every great city; for such the prison can be nothing but a home. It is well known that the lot of the convict, miserable as it is, with its dull routine and perpetual surveillance, is yet easier, less laborious, and far more healthy than that to which thousands of honest working men are condemned throughout Great Britain. The fate reserved for a French convict is one that might well be the reward of honesty. He is sent to New Caledonia, to marry, to settle, perhaps to become rich. “I do not know,” an ex-deputy, sent out to report on the condition of the convicts, is said to have declared, “any struggling peasant or small proprietor in France who would not gladly exchange his lot for that of a convict of the first class in New Caledonia.” “The working classes,” as Professor Prins, one of the most able and thoughtful students of this subject, remarks, “badly housed, badly nourished, vegetate at the mercy of economic crises.[120] The worker is always on the borders of vagabondage; the vagabond is always on the borders of crime. The entire working classes are thus exposed in the first line, and whether it is a question of disease or of crime, it is they who succumb first.”[121] Crime would be much commoner than it is if it were not for the communistic practice of mutual helpfulness which rules so largely among the poorest classes, and mitigates the stress of misery. All the more thoughtful students of the criminal, among whom Ferri in this respect stands first, have seen the direct bearing on criminality of what Colajanni has called Social Hygiene. We may neglect the problems of social organisation, but we do so at our peril.