how much they could pay? And stocks, brewery premises and tied houses are inevitably all in the same beer-logged boat. The sort of critic we are imagining might even be guilty of making a bad pun about assets being sometimes too liquid, when liquor is out of fashion.
But when he comes to goodwill, he will really open his shoulders and slog. For he will tell us, which is true, that goodwill is an item never seen in the sort of balance-sheet that is produced by the elect of the financial world, the banks and insurance companies, and will go on to say, what is much more doubtful, that it has no right to be in any balance-sheet at all, but ought to have been written off years ago out of profits; and that this is a case in point because the value of the Bass goodwill depends entirely on the fame of their beer, and if the public gives up drinking beer, this value becomes a vanishing quantity.
Finally such a critic might add that any balance-sheet is worse than useless as a guide to the position of a company, because the people who draw them up, and the authorities whose business it is to examine them, have not yet made up their minds on the very important question as to what a balance ought to show, whether it should set out to display the way in which the company's money has been spent, or
