than the Mahommedan's road to heaven, and cautiously bold must be the
feet that safely tread it! Blessed shall that man be who succeeds in
crossing. The nations shall rise up and call him blessed, and succeeding
generations shall praise him.

We come then to the relations of the press and the Executive. We have
seen that all liberty is _relative_, and not _absolute_; that the
people, the sovereigns in this country, have prescribed certain methods
for securing, in ordinary periods, those blessings which it is their
desire to enjoy; that when, under special contingencies, these methods
become insufficient for this purpose, the people may, in virtue of their
sovereignty, suspend them and adopt others adequate to the occasion;
that these may not, indeed, from their very nature, cannot be of a fixed
and circumscribed kind, but must give large discretionary power into the
hands of the Executive, to be used by him in a summary manner as
contingencies may indicate; that this abrogation or suspension, for the
time, of so much of the ordinary civil law, in favor of the contingent
law, is not an abandonment of free government for arbitary or despotic
government, because it is still in accordance with the will of the
people, and hence is merely the substitution of a new form of law,
which, being required for occasions when instant action is demanded, is
necessarily summary in its character; that the extent to which this law
is to be substituted for the ordinary one is to be discovered by the
Executive from the general sense of the nation, when it cannot be made
known through the common method of the ballot box and the legislature;
that in the people resides the power ultimately to determine whether
their wishes have been correctly interpreted or not; and, finally, that
the Executive is equally responsible for coming short of the behests of
the nation in the use of the contingent law or for transgressing the
boundaries within which they desire him to constrain his actions.