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 give the necessary time, it is still possible that when he has done it, some change in the condition of his gastric juices, or perhaps the chance discovery of a pleasant fruit that he finds growing freely on the island, might make him much less eager for fish than he was, and may thus induce him to leave the boat to rot which he had so painfully produced at the expense of his leisure, or of economic activity, which he might have put into other enterprises. Thus even though the whole project as he thought it out was perfectly sound from his point of view, yet even the economic Crusoe, working with no one's feelings to consider but his own, cannot free himself from the possibility of failure, owing to a miscalculation of his own market. Complete freedom in an economic sense is in fact very rarely obtainable for any individual, with the exception, as we shall see, of the modern capitalist under certain unusual circumstances.

It is important that these truisms should be borne in mind, because there is a tendency in these times to blame the framework of society as it is at present constructed, for the lack of economic freedom enjoyed by the vast majority of its members. Crusoe's case has shown us that under what are called natural conditions,