Note 178 — Chapter XIII

When I was a member of the House of Commons, there was a great brewer, a most excellent man, who sat close to me on the cross benches, who frequently complained of the heavy “losses” he sustained in his trade. I was under the impression that the brewing trade was a very lucrative one, especially to persons like himself, who conducted it on a gigantic scale, and I was puzzled to understand how, in the face of such “losses,” he could continue adding vat to vat, and rearing fresh mountains of beer-barrels every year to his brewery yard. Turning one night to a mutual friend who knew him more intimately than I did, I asked, in the simplicity of my heart, if it really was the case that the great establishment of which our friend was the senior was a losing concern. “It is so,” he answered, “according to our friend’s way of calculating; for every pound less than 75,000l. per annum, which is estimated as his share of the net profits, is booked as loss!” Such must also have been the way in which some of our large shipowners calculated their “losses” after the repeal of the Navigation Laws.