A newspaper of our vintage learns, over many decades, to distinguish between a crisis and a cadence. The present fuel question is a cadence. The pumps have held; the reserve is intact; the tariff will rise, as tariffs rise, and a technical session will determine whether and how its edge is blunted for those households least able to bear it. This is not the description of a country in extremity. It is the description of a country in winter.

The Leader of the Opposition has discovered, to his credit, that the word 'restraint' admits of an unflattering reading. He has applied that reading vigorously, on four consecutive days, in a rival paper and through the editor network, and he will apply it again. We wish him well in his vocation, which is to oppose. Ours is different. Ours is to describe what is in the ledger, who has put it there, and at what cost to whom.

The ledger, today, shows that the Cordoba group has cleared its cargoes on schedule for the fifth consecutive week; that the strategic reserve stands where it stood a month ago; that the Cardinal-Minister's petition for corridors through the strait has been joined by a coordinated communiqué of neighbouring states; and that the Chamber will, on Wednesday, proceed to the second reading of the fishing cooperatives bill, the Cape Vell samples having returned clean. These are not slogans. They are entries. A government is, in the end, a set of entries, and a responsible opposition is one that proposes better entries rather than louder ones.

On Don Rafael's address at the Convention Hall yesterday evening, the Herald has recorded, for the third time this week, a respectful dissent on the public-order clause. We do so again, because we were not founded in 1882 to applaud every passage of every speech delivered by every figure we admire. We were founded to print what happened and to say what we think.

What we think, today, is that the country is being governed as it ought to be governed in a difficult week: without theatrics, without panic, and without the mistaking of a slogan for a policy. When that ceases to be the case, this column will say so. Until then, the ledger, and not the slogan, will govern here.