Castigating Polk was the most obvious opportunity for the harvesters, and they used it with due zeal. Some of the jibes were good-natured. Playing on the powers legally his, the _National Intelligencer_ happily exclaimed, "Here, there, everywhere at once, civil, military, judicial and executive, dove of peace, thunderbolt of war, and a perfect serpent of diplomacy, who was ever so various or so amazing?" Bracketing the President of the United States with a famous dwarf of the day as "Tom Thumb's cousin, Jim Thumb," was another merry as well as able fling. To remark, however, when he sent in a Message, that he came "puffing and blowing into Congress," went a trifle too far, perhaps; and other pleasantries exposed themselves distinctly to that criticism. The Boston _Atlas_ described the war Message as "perfectly characteristic of its author;--weak, wheedling and sneaking," while some thought it better to sail on the other tack, and picture "His High Mightiness," the arrogant, domineering tyrant of the White House, as planting "his foot upon the charter of our liberties."[34.13] Despatching Taylor to the Rio Grande was called "a well-nigh fatal blunder," even though suggested by the "demon," who was commonly thought rather shrewd. Letting Santa Anna go back to Mexico seemed to different Whigs like treason, treachery, folly and idiocy. Polk "takes his ease on some _sixty-eight dollars per day_," while the soldiers he has driven to the field subsist on fare that "his very slaves would loathe," the Whig _Almanac_ luckily discovered. Bribery, duplicity, falsehood, imbecility, cowardice and infamy were a few of the other good things found in the President's conduct; and the chief Whig organ undertook to lay him finally at rest on the greensward in this elegant fashion: "Why, the very savage of the courtyard in other times--that most brutal of mankind, the bully of the bailiwick, who chewed up an ear or nose, or scooped out with thumb a prostrate adversary's eye--was generous in comparison."[34.13] In attempting more serious criticism the Whigs met with embarrassments. The majority of them, whose argument had been that immediate annexation of Texas would necessarily mean war, could not with inward peace declare that Polk had brought on the war by sending Taylor to the Rio Grande; and the great number whose contention had been that Mexico still owned Texas could not well deny that annexing her province by an Act of Congress, which amounted on their theory to a constitutional declaration of war, had created a state of things which made it entirely proper for Polk to send Taylor there. "Swindlers of 1844, with your 'peaceable annexation,' do not skulk! Here is the fruit of _your_ doings! Look it in the face!" exclaimed the New York _Tribune_ when the war bill passed, but it soon appeared more tactful to ignore this aspect of the matter.[34.14] [EMBARRASSMENTS OF THE WHIGS]