There is a kind of patience that is a virtue, and a kind that is merely a convenience to those who do not have to practise it. The distinction is old, and the Cardenal reminded us of it from the pulpit last evening, in a homily that one hopes will be read as widely as it was heard.

It is easy, in a week of alarms, to mistake loud speech for courage and quiet speech for timidity. Those who have counselled the Crown against flinging open the Fuel Stabilisation Reserve at the first cry have been accused, by certain voices, of indifference to the pump and the net. The accusation does not survive a visit to the quays at Sant Joan, where the ferrymen will sail on Monday and the trawler cooperatives will set out at dawn because the instrument has been drawn with care and not in haste.

We have heard, too, a call for a snap election. It is the prerogative of the opposition to make such calls, and the prerogative of the country to ignore them when they arrive at an inconvenient hour. A kingdom in the middle of a fuel shock and a cordon and a registry breach has, one submits, other uses for its Mondays.

The Herald records with gratitude the Cardenal's intercessions for our missing colleagues, and with approval the Foreign Minister's firmness with two ambassadors in as many days. We record with equal approval the cabinet's decision, long counselled by the patriarch of the Bloc del Puerto, that a reserve should be drawn and not drained.

The word "stability" has been put to hard service this week, in essays printed here and elsewhere. It is a word that deserves its rest. What the country requires, and what it appears on the eve of Monday to have, is not a posture of stability but the plain thing itself: a fleet that sails, a ferry that runs, a Chamber that sits, and a Crown that steadies the pumps without emptying the cistern.

That is patience of the useful kind. One commends it to all concerned.