The calendar, this week, has done more work than the politicians. The Port Sanitation Council will report on Sunday evening. The Chamber will vote on Monday morning on the Fuel Stabilisation Reserve. The northern tariff file waits in the sitting after. None of these three questions can now be answered without the other two in view, and the arrangement is not accidental.

One hears, in the harbour rooms of Almaria Vella, that the sequence was the Proprietor's preference — that the sanitation report should precede the reserve vote rather than follow it. One hears, in the offices off Plaça del Rei, that the Nationalist leader preferred the same order for reasons of his own. One hears, from the Opposition steps, that the whole arrangement is a conspiracy. The first two accounts are, for our purposes, sufficient.

What a Chamber decides on Monday will be shaped by what a Council writes on Sunday, and what a Council writes on Sunday will be read, by the merchants and the carriers and the insurers, with the surcharges of the corridor in one hand and the manifests of two quarantined vessels in the other. A truce in the eastern basin, however fragile, removes one variable. It does not remove the others.

The Cardenal's essay, printed in full elsewhere in this edition, reminds its readers that the measure of a people in trial is not the absence of fear but the presence of one another. The Chamber's reading of this, on Monday, will be narrower, as the Chamber's readings usually are. But the sentence will be there, in the week's record, whether the Chamber attends to it or not.

This desk, for its part, will print the Sunday report on Monday morning. The rest is for the benches to decide, and for the benches to explain, and, in due course, for the column inches of a later edition to judge.