Don Rafael Castellano Vidal, Leader of the Nationalist Party, has submitted to the editor network a fresh op-ed under the title 'Restraint and Reserves: A Traditionalist Call in Turbulent Times,' and the Herald prints its substance here as his standing in the national conversation requires. The piece argues, with the cadence familiar to readers of his weekly column, that a kingdom tried by external shock is best served by the prudent drawing of strategic stocks, by fidelity to treaty, and by a refusal of the novelties which the present crisis has invited from other quarters.

On the first two counts the Herald finds little to dispute. Don Rafael's insistence that the reserve is an instrument of state and not an instrument of politics is a sober point, and his defence of the kingdom's treaty posture echoes, in its own register, the reassurances offered yesterday by Doctora Ferré at the Palau de la Diplomàcia.

It is upon the third count that this paper must, as yesterday, part company. Don Rafael's op-ed contains a passage on public order which, were it enacted in the terms he proposes, would place an unhappy construction upon rights that the Constitution of 1978 settled in plain words. We admire the author; we reprint the argument; we decline the clause. The reader will judge.

The op-ed arrives amid a week in which the Nationalist bench has been unusually visible, convening at least one closed meeting at a Cordoba address and exchanging, through the ordinary editor channels, the habitual private correspondence which binds the capital's commentariat. None of this is improper; all of it is the weather of the capital in a hard fortnight.

It remains the Herald's view that the arguments of restraint and the arguments of reform are both owed a fair hearing, and that the former, in Don Rafael's hands, is owed more hearing than it sometimes receives. The clause, however, we set aside.