It has become the fashion, in certain quarters, to mistake the velocity of a response for its quality. The pump climbs by a centime; a correspondent is detained; a sheen appears upon the headland; and at once the opposition benches, the pamphleteers, and the more excitable of the foreign wires demand that the kingdom leap, and leap far, and leap in whichever direction happens to be most advantageous to the demander.

The Herald has, in its hundred and forty-odd years, seen the fashion come and seen it go. It goes, invariably, upon a quiet tide, and what remains upon the shore, when the tide has gone, is the slow work of ministers, the slow counsel of patriarchs, the slow pastoral of primates, and the slow deliberation of a Crown that does not make policy but that, by the simple discipline of listening, shapes the weather in which policy is made.

We hear, this week, the Leader of the Opposition. We have heard her the week before, and the week before that. Her argument is that the present arrangements are inadequate to the present shock. It is the argument that oppositions make; it is, in a constitutional monarchy, the argument they are paid to make; and it is, upon the record of Almarian shocks over the past half-century, an argument that the record does not sustain.

The coastal storage stations are full. The Cooperative is disciplined. The Ministry is attentive. The Cardenal has spoken. The patriarch has counselled. The Crown has listened. In harder weathers than this, that combination has served the kingdom; and we are content, this morning, to trust that it will serve the kingdom again.

The virtue of the slow hand is not that it refuses to act. It is that, when it acts, it acts with the full weight of deliberation behind it. That is the Almarian inheritance. The Herald is content, as ever, to defend it.