Page:Hints About Investments (1926).pdf/124

 Has the shareholder, who wishes to sell his holding, no rights as to some real knowledge of the value of what he is selling? . . . If it is said that all we are concerned with in the balance-sheet is that it is a final clear up of the accounts, I have nothing more to say. If you say two balance-sheets of the same concern can be quite different and yet both be equally accurate and true and desirable, I have nothing to say. When I was a surveyor of taxes, I often had people coming to me with sheets of paper and saying, 'Well, I do not keep much of accounts, but I have made up that for the bank manager, and it puts the best face on things.' One day I was talking to a bank manager friend, and he said that people often came to him with accounts and said, 'Here is a thing I had to prepare for the tax people, and so I am at least as right as that.' To one it was to be a maximum, to the other a minimum. Ought the balance-sheet to be a thing you can pull this way and that? If that is our idea, it may well be that it is destined to be radically changed in the next generation. Now, why the financial community should acquiesce in a condition of things in which a balance-sheet can be almost anything I cannot imagine. Auditors' certificates refer not merely to it being corect accord-