It is the oldest observation in our trade that a kingdom in a hard week reveals its preferences in small gestures: the passage a citizen underlines, the phrase a minister repeats, the silence a patriarch breaks. This week has been no exception.

The patriarch of Almaria Vella has spoken, and the phrase the kingdom has already taken up is the one about the household which does not quarrel at the hearth. It is a good phrase because it is a true one. A household which spends its fortnight of shortage accusing its own members of conspiracy is a household in which the fire, when it comes, finds nobody at the door.

The Leader of the Opposition has preferred a different grammar. Her op-ed in the Independent Tribune — we have read it; our readers may read it where it was printed — names a 'duopoly' of Crown and Cordoba and charges it with the contrivance of the present pain. The charge is grave and, in the form she makes it, unsupported. The pain at the pump is imported from waters a thousand miles east of Cape Vell; the patriarch did not set the match to the refinery, and the King did not close the strait. One may demand a faster release of reserves without accusing the hearth of having lit the storm.

We have ourselves, more than once, declined to endorse a clause of Don Rafael's construction, and we do so again today. A paper which agrees with every friend and disagrees with every stranger is not a paper but a pamphlet. The Herald is, we trust, a paper.

The Cardinal asks for charity at home and corridors abroad. The ministries are doing arithmetic. The Chamber will sit on Tuesday. This is, in its unglamorous way, how a kingdom endures a fortnight: not by the denunciation of its neighbours but by the patient assembly of the instruments it already possesses. The reserve is one such instrument. The duty schedule is another. The pulpit is a third, and the press, within the limits of its honesty, a fourth.

We commend, to any reader still reading, the patriarch's figure of the hearth. We commend, with it, the older figure of the household — which in Almaria has always meant not only those at table but those who cannot, this fortnight, afford to set one.