berate the man, one for breaking the law by taking away his cane, and
the other for breaking the law by the commission of a battery! Every man
feels instinctively that in such a crisis all weapons of defence are at
his disposal, and that he takes them, _not_ in violation of law, but in
obedience to the law of extraordinary contingencies, which every
community adopts, but which no community can inscribe upon its statute
book, _because it is_ the law of contingencies.

The Executive of this, as of every country, resorts to this law when, in
the nature of things, the statute law is inadequate. In doing this, he
does not violate law; he only adopts another kind of law. A subtle,
delicate law, indeed, which can neither be inscribed among the
enactments, nor exactly defined, circumscribed, or expressed. When it is
to be substituted for the ordinary modes of legal procedure, how far it
is to be used, when its use must cease--these are questions which the
people, as the sole final arbiters, must decide. As the individual in
society must judge wisely when the community will sanction his use of
the contingent law, the law of private military power, so to speak, in
his own behalf; so must the Executive judge when the urgency of the
national defence demands the exercise of the summary power in the place
of more technical methods. If the public sentiment of the community
sustain the individual, it is an indorsement that he acted justifiably
in accordance with this exceptional law; if it do not, he is liable for
an unwarranted usurpation of power. The Executive stands in the same
relation to the nation. The Mohammedans relate that the road to heaven
is two miles long, stretching over a fathomless abyss, the only pathway
across which is narrower than a razor's edge. Delicately balanced must
be the body which goes over in safety! The intangible path which the
Executive must walk to meet the people's wishes on the one side, and to
avoid their fears upon the other, in the national peril, is narrower