A reserve, by its nature, is sealed. That is its virtue and, in quieter seasons, its reproach: the citizen passes the warehouse and wonders what exactly is being husbanded, and on whose authority, and against which rainy day. The question is not unreasonable. Reserves are expensive to keep, and the men who keep them acquire, over the years, a certain proprietary air.

This week the rainy day has arrived — or rather, the dry one, which in the matter of petroleum amounts to the same thing. The Strait of Kethara is declared contested; two of our tankers wait at anchor; the underwriters have begun their arithmetic, which, being underwriters, they will not hurry. The Chamber returns Monday to a vote it had already deferred twice. The reserve, still sealed, is now plainly the subject of the session rather than its accessory.

One notes, without comment, that the building in which yesterday's emergency session was held is the building whose chairman has for fifteen years argued that such reserves ought to exist, and ought not to be opened lightly, and ought when opened to be opened by those who understand the difference between a price spike and a structural shortage. The argument has not altered. The circumstances have come to meet it.

There will be those, on Monday, who treat the vote as a moral occasion — who will ask why the seal was placed in the first place and whose interests it has served while intact. The questions are fair. They are also, this week, secondary. The primary question is whether the Kingdom prefers a fortnight of expensive diesel or a summer of rationed diesel, and the answer will not be supplied by rhetoric.

One further observation, offered in the spirit of a paper that has watched many such Mondays. The Cardenal has asked for the Maritime Safety Subcommittee to sit before the fuel vote. The request has not yet been scheduled. It should be. A Chamber that votes on the reserve without first hearing from the men who insure the hulls, and from the pastor who will on Sunday read fourteen names aloud, will have voted in a narrower room than the one the Kingdom is in.