Thus Machiavelli--in contrast to Locke, Rousseau and Mill--sought to incorporate into the constitution a regularized system of standby emergency powers to be invoked with suitable checks and controls in time of national danger. He attempted forthrightly to meet the problem of combining a capacious reserve of power and speed and vigor in its application in time of emergency, with effective constitutional restraints. CONTEMPORARY THEORISTS Contemporary political theorists, addressing themselves to the problem of response to emergency by constitutional democracies, have employed the doctrine of constitutional dictatorship. Criticism of their schemes for emergency governance is made difficult by the ambiguities latent in the terminology they adopt. An effort is made below to distinguish between those who mean dictatorship when they say dictatorship, and those who say dictatorship when they mean to refer to any effort by constitutional government to respond adequately to emergency conditions. However idiosyncratic the individual definitions of dictatorship, the theories of constitutional dictatorship explicitly or implicitly posit a transition in time of emergency from the processes of constitutionalism to those of an outright or slightly modified authoritarian system. Frederick M. Watkins, who is responsible for the classic study of the Weimar experience with emergency powers,[28] appears to have based his general discussion of emergency powers upon _a priori_ reasoning rather than upon empirical research.[29] Provided it “serves to protect established institutions from the danger of permanent injury in a period of temporary emergency, and is followed by a prompt return to the previous forms of political life,” Watkins can see “no reason why absolutism should not be used as a means for the defense of liberal institutions.”[30] He recognized the two key elements of the problem of emergency governance, as well as all constitutional governance: increasing administrative powers of the executive while at the same time “imposing limitations upon that power.”[31] He rejects legislative checks upon the exercise of executive emergency powers as an effective method of imposing such limitations, for “it is clearly unrealistic to rely on a government-controlled majority in the legislature to exercise effective supervision over that same government in its use of emergency powers.”[32] On the other hand, judicial review of executive emergency action on its merits is regarded with admiration tempered only by regret at the delay inherent in judicial proceedings.[33]