German contempt for American feeling could no further go. A cabinet meeting held on March 20, 1917, disclosed that the President's colleagues, even reputed pacifists like Secretaries Daniels and Baker, were a unit in regarding a state of armed neutrality as inadequate to meet the serious situation. The President was confronted with the necessity of immediately taking more drastic action rather than continuing to pursue measures of passive defense against the submarine peril represented by arming ships. The cabinet's demand was for an earlier convocation of Congress and a declaration that a state of war existed between the United States and Germany. The President listened, and that evening attended a theater supposedly to divert and prepare his mind for coping with the gravest of problems. Events proved that he had already determined his course. Armed neutrality was a delusive phrase and misrepresented actual conditions; it merely glozed over a state of undeclared hostility and deceived no one. Yet it had its adherents; they wanted to give it a fair trial before discarding the pretense that it existed. The Government, they said, should wait and see how armed ships fared at the hands of German submarines. If they proved equal to encounters with U-boats, or, better still, if the U-boats did not dare to attack them, there would be no occasion for further action. The proposal would not bear scrutiny since it was now known that Germany regarded armed merchantmen as ships of war and their crews as combatants. The next day, March 21, 1917, the President issued a proclamation calling upon Congress to assemble on April 2, instead of April 16, "to receive a communication concerning grave matters of national policy." The national emergency which had been in existence since Germany began sinking American ships in pursuance of her unrestricted submarine policy was now acknowledged. It would be the function of Congress, if the President so advised, to declare that a state of war existed between the Government of the United States and that of the German Empire. And a waiting and willing nation was left in no doubt that war there would be. The cabinet had become a war cabinet and the country warlike, goaded to retaliatory action by the wanton deeds of the most cruel government of this or any other age. As the spokesman of an imperialistic regime preserving its accustomed role of a wolf in sheep's clothing, the German Chancellor addressed the Reichstag on March 29, 1917, and took cognizance of the critical situation in the United States in these terms: "Within the next few days the directors of the American nation will be convened by President Wilson for an extraordinary session of Congress in order to decide the question of war or peace between the American and German nations.