Yet the true intentions of the President and his Cabinet were as uncertain as those of the Twelfth Congress, which had not yet met. A very large part of the public could not believe war to be possible, and the Government itself shared so far in the doubt as to wait for Congress to give the impulse so often refused. When the President and his Cabinet met in Washington to prepare for the session of Congress called for November 4, a month earlier than usual, neither the Cabinet nor the congressmen felt a certainty of the future; and so little did the outside world believe in war, that Madison, Monroe, and Gallatin were supposed to be aiming at a diplomatic rather than at a military victory. In truth they had no well-defined plan. The process by which a scattered democracy decided its own will, in a matter so serious as a great and perhaps fatal war, was new to the world; bystanders were surprised and amused at the simplicity with which the people disputed plans of war and peace, giving many months of warning and exact information to the enemy, while they showed no sign of leadership, discipline, or union, or even a consciousness that such qualities were needed. Men like Josiah Quincy, Rufus King, John Randolph, and even Madison and Gallatin, seeing that the people themselves, like the machine of government they had invented, were incompetent to the work of war, waited with varied emotions, but equally believing or fearing that at last a fatal crisis was at hand. Monroe was far from easy; but he had accepted, as was his wont, the nearest dominating will, and he drifted without an effort, although his old friends had already parted company with him. Though obliged to support the President in holding that Napoleon’s decrees were withdrawn so that they had ceased to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, he showed that he did so, not so much because he thought it the truth, as because England gave him no choice. To Serurier, the French minister, Monroe made little concealment of his real wishes; and when Serurier first called at the Department after Monroe’s return from Virginia, he heard nothing that greatly pleased him.