There is a movement afoot in Misquah, advanced with the best of intentions and the worst of timing, to install a fourth stop sign at the corner of Birch Street and Second Avenue. This newspaper, which has watched the question come and go for the better part of seventy years, respectfully suggests that the town leave the post be.

The argument for the sign is one of symmetry. Three corners have signs; one does not; the bare post offends a certain orderly cast of mind. We understand the impulse. We feel it ourselves on occasion, generally while looking at our own desk.

But the corner works. It has worked since 1957. Drivers stop at the fourth corner without being told to — out of habit, out of caution, out of respect for the late Einar Erickson’s mailbox, which still stands there and which a person learns young not to take lightly. There has not been a collision at that intersection in fifty-five years. We are aware of no other stretch of road in the county that can say the same, sign or no sign.

What gives us pause is not the forty dollars, nor the three hundred and forty the county quotes once the post and the labor are added in. It is what tends to follow. A fourth sign invites a fifth. It invites a traffic study, and a line item, and a consultant, and in time a man from somewhere else standing at our corner with a clipboard, explaining our own town to us. It invites, in a word, precisely the thing most people who settle here came here to get away from.

Some matters are better left to the understanding of neighbors than to the instruction of signs. A four-way stop that everyone already treats as a four-way stop does not need to be told that it is one. There is a quiet trust encoded in that bare post — a small daily agreement that the people of this town know how to conduct themselves at a quiet corner without being ordered to. We would not trade it for symmetry.

The council has formed a subcommittee, which will study the question and report at the July 14 hearing. We wish its members well, and we will be there. But our view is plain, and we will state it once and then, like the corner itself, fall quiet: leave the post be.