1. Never Administer Punishment in Anger
The first general rule to which I would refer is, never administer punishment in anger. A saying of Socrates deserves to be carefully borne in mind. Turning one day upon his insolent servant, Speucippus, who had subjected him to great annoyance, he exclaimed, "I should beat you now, sirrah, were I not so angry with you." The practice of most men is the very opposite; they beat and punish because they are angry.
But it is clear that we cannot trust ourselves to correct another while we are enraged. The intensity of our anger is proportional to the degree of annoyance which we have experienced, but it happens quite frequently that a great annoyance may be caused by a slight fault, just as, conversely, the greatest fault may cause us only slight annoyance, or may even contribute to our pleasure. We should administer serious punishment where the fault is serious, and slight punishment where the fault is slight. But, as I have just said, a slight fault may sometimes cause serious annoyance, just as a slight spark thrown into a powder magazine may cause a destructive explosion. And we do often resemble a powder magazine, being filled with suppressed inflammable irritations, so that a trivial naughtiness on the part of a child may cause a most absurd display of temper.
But is it the child's fault that we are in this irascible condition? To show how a slight fault may sometimes cause a most serious annoyance, let me remind you of the story of Vedius Pollio, the Roman. He was one day entertaining the Emperor Augustus at dinner. During the banquet a slave who was carrying one of the crystal goblets by which his master set great store, in his nervousness suffered the goblet to fall from his hand so that it broke into a thousand pieces on the floor. Pollio was so infuriated that he ordered the slave to be bound and thrown into a neighboring fishpond, to be devoured by the lampreys. The Emperor interfered to save the slave's life, but Pollio was too much enraged to defer even to the Emperor's wish. Thereupon Augustus ordered that every crystal goblet in the house should be broken in his presence, that the slave should be set free, and that the obnoxious fishpond should be closed.
The breaking of a goblet or vase is a good instance of how a slight fault, a mere inadvertency, may cause serious damage and great chagrin. In the same way an unseasonable word, loud conversation, a bit of pardonable mischief, which we should overlook under ordinary circumstances, may throw us into a fury when we are out of sorts. When we have urgent business and are kept waiting, we are apt, unless we keep a curb on our tempers, to break forth into violent complaints, which indeed are quite proportional to the amount of annoyance we experience, but not necessarily to the fault of the person who occasions it.
Our business is to cure faults, and in order to accomplish this end the punishment should be meted out in due proportion to the fault. Instead of following this principle, the great majority of men when they punish are not like reasonable beings, selecting right means toward a true end, but like hot springs which boil over because they cannot contain themselves.
We ought never to punish in anger. No one can trust himself when in that state; an angry man is always liable to overshoot the mark; we must wait until our angry feeling has had time to cool.
Do I then advise that we administer punishment in cold blood? No, we ought to correct the faults of others with a certain moral warmth expressed in our words and manner, a warmth which is produced by our reprehension of the fault, not by the annoyance which it causes us. This, then, is the first rule: Never punish in anger.