There is, in every season of economic alarm, a temptation to which the unseasoned politician is particularly prone: to mistake the treasury for a pantry, and to propose that the remedy for a cold evening is the burning of the kitchen furniture. The forecourts of the capital registered 1.94 dinars the litre this Thursday, a figure high enough to unsettle any householder, and certain voices in the Chamber have risen, with the dependable promptness of a weathercock, to demand that the sealed portion of the Fuel Stabilisation Reserve be flung open at once, and distributed with the generous indiscrimination of a wedding feast.

This paper dissents. A reserve which may be broken upon the first political tremor is not a reserve; it is a queue. The sealed-reserve formula endorsed by the Cabinet sub-committee — and commended yesterday, in characteristically unhurried terms, by the patriarch of the House of Cordoba — rests upon the elementary insight that the worst of a storm is rarely the first hour of it. The targeted relief now flowing to the Cordoba fishing cooperatives and to the outer-island ferries is not a meagre gesture; it is a directed one, and the distinction is the whole of statecraft.

We grant that the forecourt price is felt. The householder who fills the tank of a small car on a Friday evening is not consoled by reference to the Eastern Mediterranean basin or to the convening of the National Petroleum Distributors' Council. But consolation is not governance, and the office of a prudent Crown — and of the ministers who serve it — is to prefer the second evening's warmth to the first evening's blaze.

Monday's sitting of the Chamber will furnish the instrument with such further scrutiny as the constitution requires. Oratory will be abundant; amendments of a rhetorical character will be offered from benches that have long since given up the discipline of arithmetic. What the country requires of its representatives, however, is not the eloquence of the outraged but the patience of the competent. The reserve is a keel. One does not burn the keel to warm the cabin. The Herald has said so before, and, with the reader's indulgence, will say so again.