The choice of the Army as a profession is discussed in one of the series named "The Complete Letter-writer," which appeared in 1844. Mr. Benjamin Allpeace, guardian to young Arthur Baytwig, pronounces against it as a gilded fraud. At best soldiers are evils of the earth, and the pomp and pageantry of war mere gimcrackery. The reality is "misery and anguish, blood and tears." This was the year in which the Prince de Joinville, Louis Philippe's third son, after bombarding Tangier and occupying Mogador, made himself notorious by his bellicose pamphleteering; but _Punch_ was equally severe on Lord Maidstone for his patriotic rhymes in the _Morning Post_, and on the warlike philanthropists of Exeter Hall, who were much exercised by the Prince's ill-will towards Great Britain. _Punch_, prohibited in France not for the first or last time for his comments on French politics, ridiculed the Chauvinists on both sides with impartial satire, and published a "Woman's Plea for Peace with France" on the ground of our debt to that country in wine, fashion, the ballet, Jullien (the popular musician and conductor resident in London, who would have to flee in case of war), and cosmetics. Later on, in the same year, we come across "Entente Cordiale" cartoons, in which _Punch_ assumes the rôle of the pacificator of Europe, and a letter to French editors protesting against the notion that John Bull is a plotter. _Punch_ had already given a half serious support to Captain Warner, the eccentric inventor, who professed to have invented a long-range invisible shell to blow up ships at a distance, hailing it as a means of ending war, and developed the argument further in a curious article on the "Science of Warfare," _à propos_ of the benevolent object of some inventors at Fulham. Their aim, it seems, was to put an end to war by making it so truly terrific that, as in the classic example of the Kilkenny cats, it would terminate its own existence by its very ferocity. Thus do we find in the mid 'forties a foreshadowing of the sinister uses of applied science and a justification of the doctrine of "frightfulness." In 1845, in connexion with the intended reorganization or calling out of the Militia, we find the first of many satirical references to the famous Brook Green Volunteer--Brook Green being "one of the bolts of the great Gate of London," as Hammersmith was the key to the metropolis on the western side. _Punch_ at this time was a bitter critic of the methods of recruiting, and his anti-militaristic zeal reached a climax in a protest against the advertisements used at Birmingham and elsewhere, in which he calls the recruiting sergeant "the clown in the bloody pantomime of glory." He had already fallen foul of Sir Charles Napier for his defence of the "cat" in 1844. The issue of August 15, 1846, contains a personal appeal to the Queen to abolish flogging in the Army. Here is the last stanza of "Lines on the Lash: to the Queen":--