At the Almaria City Convention Hall yesterday evening, before a regional congress of the Nationalist Party whose numbers the organisers put at something above three thousand, Don Rafael Cordoba delivered an address of the kind that has, over twenty years, made his reputation and occasionally unsettled his friends. It was titled, in the printed programme, 'A Nation's Soul Cannot Be Legislated Away.'

The body of the speech, which ran to some forty minutes and was interrupted by applause on fourteen occasions, returned to themes familiar to readers of this column: the primacy of family and parish, the custodial duty of the Crown, the particular genius of the Almarian settlement, and the dangers of importing, by statute or by fashion, the quarrels of jurisdictions not our own. Don Rafael's argument was pitched, as it usually is, above the week's headlines; he made no direct reference to the tariff, and only a single oblique reference to the strait.

On one passage the Herald must, as it has on two preceding occasions this week, record a respectful dissent. Don Rafael proposed, in the closing section of his remarks, a broadening of the public-order provisions under which assemblies in the outer districts may be regulated. We have said, and we say again, that the clause as drafted strains the plain text of the constitutional settlement of 1887, and that a party which prides itself on continuity does itself no service by amending the country's first principles in a conference hall.

The Herald prints the speech in substance because Don Rafael's standing in the national conversation requires it, and because a newspaper that covers only the opinions it shares is not a newspaper. We print the dissent because a newspaper that prints only agreement is not one either.

The remainder of the address was received warmly in the hall and will be received warmly in the country. Don Rafael's closing passage, on the duty of a generation to hand its inheritance forward unbroken, drew the congress to its feet. The party's regional officers are expected to adopt a platform document within the week.