rating losses
sustained during the period in which this property was operated by the
United States. The Court awarded judgment for $2,241.46 and the Supreme
Court sustained this judgment, a result which implied the validity of
the seizure.[443] Said Justice Reed, in his concurring opinion of the
case: "The relatively new technique of temporary taking by eminent
domain is a most useful administrative device: many properties, such as
laundries, or coal mines, or railroads, may be subjected to public
operation only for a short time to meet war or emergency needs, and can
then be returned to their owners." The implications of United States
_v._ Pewee Coal Company, Inc.,[444] clearly sustained the Government in
Youngstown, assuming that Congress had not acted in the latter case. And
one instance of seizure by executive order Justice Frankfurter fails to
mention. This was the seizure by President Wilson in the late summer of
1914, following the outbreak of war in Europe, of the Marconi Wireless
Station at Siasconset when the Company refused assurance that it would
comply with naval censorship regulations. Attorney General Gregory's
justification of this action at the time was quoted on an earlier
page.[445]

The doctrine dictated by the above considerations as regards the
exercise of executive power in the field of legislative power was well
stated by Mr. John W. Davis, principal counsel on the present occasion
for the steel companies, in a brief which he filed nearly forty years
ago as Solicitor General, in defense of the action of the President in
withdrawing certain lands from public entry although his doing so was at
the time contrary to express statute. "Ours," the brief reads, "is a
self-sufficient Government within its sphere. (Ex parte Siebold, 100
U.S. 371, 395; in re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 578.) 'Its means are adequate
to its ends' (McCulloch _v._ Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 424), and it is
rational to assume that its active forces will be found equal in most
things to the emergencies that confront it. While perfect flexibility is
not to be expected in a Government of divided powers, and while division
of power is one of the principal features of the Constitution, it is the
plain duty of those who are called upon to draw the dividing lines to
ascertain the essential, recognize the practical, and avoid a slavish
formalism which can only serve to ossify the Government and reduce its
efficiency without any compensating good.