avoid their fears upon the other, in the national peril, is narrower 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.