“But if we cannot confine military expedients by the Constitution, neither would I distort the Constitution to approve all that the military may deem expedient.... “A military commander may overstep the bounds of constitutionality, and it is an incident. But if we review and approve, that passing incident becomes a doctrine of the Constitution ... a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order....”[737] It is true that the existence of this power in the government in wartime, and the admitted inability of the Court to restrict it, is “an inherent threat to liberty.” “But I would not lead people to rely on this Court for a review that seems to me wholly delusive. The military reasonableness of these orders can only be determined by the military superiors. If the people ever let command of the war power fall into irresponsible hands, the courts wield no power equal to its restraint. The chief restraint upon those who command the physical forces of the country, in the future as in the past, must be their responsibilities to the political judgments of their contemporaries and to the moral judgments of history.”[738] Like Machiavelli, Jackson conducts an analysis in simple power terms. But while Machiavelli suggested it was possible to devise ways to circumscribe and check the exercise of emergency power by leaders in a republic, the modern liberal, true to the tradition of Locke, can conceive of no limits upon the actions of a war government but the force of public opinion. _The Constitution as a Flexible Charter_: Although as recently as World War II all three strains of thought regarding emergency powers of the Chief Executive during wartime found effective expression in opinions of individual justices on the Court, the most persistent has been the attempt to compromise the range of views by positing a Constitution broad and flexible enough to encompass emergency action responsive to existing need, as measured by the Court. This has been described by Professor Corwin as “constitutional relativity.”[739] The “clear and present danger” doctrine, first enunciated by Justice Holmes in the _Schenck_ case[740] is an example of constitutional relativity. Its recent application illustrates what is to be expected when the Court, having accepted the obligation to determine the necessity for emergency action, subsequently is led by doubts as to the adequacy of its tools for measurement to redefine the conditions of an emergency in such a manner as virtually to evade the problem.[741] It also points up some of the difficulties in consistently applying whatever criteria for measurement are developed by the Court.