Board can do is to draw that picture as accurately as it can.
(5) That as to goodwill, the balance-sheet might easily have been made prettier in the eyes of many critics, if instead of amassing a Reserve of £950,000 the Board had written off, as they could evidently have easily done, the whole of the £800,000 at which goodwill is valued. But that nevertheless under modern conditions of industry selling power is almost, if not quite, as important as power to make a good article, that a Bass label on a bottle has a quite miraculous power as a seller, and in short that if there be any enterprise in the world that has a right to set out its goodwill as a valuable asset, that enterprise is Bass's brewery.
After which the chastened investor, having discovered that the soundness of a balance-sheet depends chiefly on that of the Board, as to which he is largely in the dark, and that he cannot expect it to tell him the future, which is what he really wants to know, may well ask whether nothing can be done to make balance-sheets more informing, and, if not, what other
