Page:Hints About Investments (1926).pdf/153

 happened to most of us to fall in love with a house or a picture or a something and to have paid hastily the sum asked for it lest someone else should snap it up, while one is quite conscious that it would be very difficult to sell it again at anything like the same figure, unless one were fortunate enough to find an equally eager buyer.

In business such individual whims do not often exert much influence, but trade competition sometimes produces startling results, as for example when some years ago the breweries were bidding against one another for the possession of licensed premises which they wanted to acquire and confine to the sale of their own products by making them "tied houses."

If, then, original cost even in the year when the sum is paid for property is not always a figure that can be set against in a balance-sheet that aims at truth—if truth means realizable value—who shall say at what pace it ought to be written down in the years that follow or what is the figure to which it should finally be brought by the process of annual reduction? Evidently there is a great difference in this respect between one item and another. Of land, Mr. Leake says definitely that "for accounting purposes" it "should be