And so the man who does wrong ought to be set right both by admonition and by force, by measures both gentle and harsh, and we should try to make him a better man for his own sake, as well as for the sake of others, stinting, not our reproof, but our anger. For what physician will show anger toward a patient? “But,” you say, “they are incapable of being reformed, there is nothing pliable in them, nothing that gives room for fair hope.” Then let them be removed from human society if they are bound to make worse all that they touch, and let them, in the only way this is possible, cease to be evil — but let this be done without hatred. For what reason have I for hating a man to whom I am offering the greatest service when I save him from himself? Does a man hate the members of his own body when he uses the knife upon them? There is no anger there, but the pitying desire to heal. Mad dogs we knock on the head; the fierce and savage ox we slay; sickly sheep we put to the knife to keep them from infecting the flock; unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal. Yet it is not anger but reason that separates the harmful from the sound. For the one who administers punishment nothing is so unfitting as anger, since punishment is all the better able to work reform if it is bestowed with judgment. This is the reason Socrates says to his slave: “I would beat you if I were not angry.” The slave’s reproof he postponed to a more rational moment; at the time it was himself he reproved. Will there be anyone, pray, who has passion under control, when even Socrates did not dare to trust himself to anger?