There is a particular kind of panic that masquerades as urgency, and we are witnessing it now. Since the disturbance in the eastern strait first registered upon the boards of the Cooperative, a chorus of voices has demanded that the kingdom act, and act at once, and act largely — as though the volume of an intervention were the measure of its wisdom.

It is not. The measure of a wise intervention is whether, a year hence, one is pleased to have made it; and a year hence, I venture, we shall not be pleased to have emptied the strategic reserves in a fortnight, nor to have set the Cooperative's price board by decree, nor to have answered a temporary shock with permanent distortions in a market that, for all its present agitations, has served the Almarian household tolerably well for a generation.

The coastal storage stations afford us weeks. The Ministry of Commerce, under a careful minister, is doing the patient arithmetic that careful ministers do. The Council of State will, in its own time, render its recommendation; and the Chamber will, in its own time, consider it. None of this is inaction. All of it is government as it ought to be conducted — slowly where speed would wound, briskly where brisk measures are warranted, and always with an eye to the winter that follows the summer.

I have heard it said, in columns more heated than this one, that such counsel is the counsel of complacency. I reject the charge, and I reject it upon the record. The record of the Cordoba house, over four generations in Almarian commerce, is a record of steady hands in harder weathers than this — the currency crisis of the sixties, the maritime embargoes of the eighties, the banking tremors of a decade past. In each case the clamour was for haste; in each case the kingdom was best served by patience.

Let us, then, be patient. Let the ministers minister; let the Cooperative cooperate; let the Crown, as is its habit, listen. The Almarian household will be the better for it, and so will the Almarian harbour, and so, in the end, will the Almarian purse.

Steadiness is not the absence of action. It is the discipline of action. The kingdom has, in harder weathers, proved itself possessed of that discipline. It will prove itself possessed of it again.