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.

The press of the United States has always been free to the extent that
it might publish whatsoever it listed, _within certain limits prescribed
by the law_. The press may still do this. But the nature of the law
which prescribes the limits has changed with the times. The constituted
authorities of the people of the United States are obliged now, in the
people's interest, to employ the processes of summary rather than those
of routine law. Hence when the press infringes too violently the
boundaries indicated, and persists in so doing, the sterner penalty
demanded by the dangers of the hour is enforced by the sterner method
likewise rendered necessary. So long as Executive action concerning the
press shall be _in accordance_ with the general sentiment of the people,
it will be within the strict scope of the highest law of the land.
Should the Executive persistently exercise this summary law in a manner
not countenanced by the nation, he is amenable to it under the strict
letter of the Constitution for h