The statute books provide at any given time a more accurate indication of the breadth and limits of executive emergency power than do exegeses on the Constitution, or histories emphasizing executive action unsupported by Congress. For in theory[9] and in practice the President will resort to an “inherent” emergency power only to the extent to which Congress has failed to anticipate and prescribe remedial action for such an emergency. On the assumption that a detailed study of the emergency powers which have been delegated to the executive by Congress in the immediate past provides insight into the probable range of such powers which will be exercised by government in the future, the authors have undertaken to survey and classify such delegations in the period 1933 to 1955.[10] It is believed that the accumulation in selected contexts of the instances of legislative delegation of emergency power will provide striking revelation of the scope and detail of control over individuals and groups which is practiced by constitutional governments in time of emergency. To this we now turn. CHAPTER II THE CONCEPT OF EMERGENCY IN DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL THOUGHT When President Eisenhower on June 16, 1955 suspended the privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_ and declared a nationwide state of mock martial law, in response to simulated A-bomb and H-bomb attacks taking a toll of some 14 million civilian casualties, he acted on the premise that the ordinary processes of democratic and constitutional government do not suffice to protect the state in time of emergency and must surrender to a modified authoritarian regime.[11] This premise is deeply embedded in the teachings of democratic political theory, which in its traditional and contemporary expression have counseled the need to abandon the processes of democratic government as the first essential response to emergency conditions. Thus, ironically, the Western democracies which today approach the close of three decades of economic and military emergency, and turn their faces to additional decades in the shadow-land between peace and war, are offered a guiding theory which regards emergency governance as an aberration, supplanting the relationships between the various branches of government, and between rulers and ruled which prevail in “normal” times. In theory the struggle to preserve limited and popularly responsible government has already been lost, for this is a luxury we are told we cannot afford.