It has been the habit of this column, in weeks of convergent crisis, to look for the word that the principal figures of our public life have in common. This week the word is stability, and it is pronounced from two houses that do not often pronounce the same word in the same month.

Don Cordoba's statement to this Herald — issued on an evening when the Foreign Ministry had just received an ambassador and the pumps had just posted their three-year high — placed the word at the head of the national ledger. Don Rafael Mendoza-Alcántara, writing within hours in a rival review, placed the same word at the head of a different argument, whose chief concern is not the ledger but the longer memory of our coast. The two essays are not the same essay. They are nonetheless addressed, by different routes, to the same anxiety.

That anxiety is not, as a certain opposition pamphleteer would have it, the anxiety of a silenced public. It is the anxiety of a small nation whose waters are being treated, by larger powers, as a convenient theatre for the rehearsal of enforcement they dare not conduct on their own. Almaria has declined the role of theatre. The Cardenal declined it in his drawing room on Tuesday; the Crown declined it in the phrase territorial approaches, retained in the communiqué at His Majesty's own insistence; Don Cordoba declined it in prose whose severity is the more telling for its plainness.

There remains the matter of the pumps, on which this newspaper will not pretend the week has yielded an answer. The sub-committee will meet. The reserve will be examined. The Chamber of Commerce has written its letter, and the fishermen of Sant Joan have mended their nets in weather that does not care what the ministers decide. A decision will be taken, and this newspaper will report it.

What we decline to report, because it is not reporting, is the fiction that sovereignty is performed by gesture and that those who counsel otherwise are complicit in its betrayal. Sovereignty is the day's work of keeping the lights on, the doors of Sant Joan open, the approaches free of third-party cordons, and the ledger honest. The Herald has been about that work since 1882. It proposes to continue.

Stability is not a slogan. It is a wage paid weekly, in attention, by those entrusted with the keeping of a country. This week, as last, the wage has been paid.