Consider what happens. An angry husband, an angry wife, sits up at night over the telephone. He talks. About what? His own injuries, the other's faults. The machine listens. It does not interrupt, does not laugh, does not ask, 'And you did nothing wrong?' It answers from what it has been given. Is it any wonder the answer pleases? He has consulted a mirror, not a judge. Anger always looks for an ally; here it has found one that never tires, never sleeps, never disagrees.

You remember Calvisius Sabinus, who bought slaves to carry Homer and Hesiod for him. "Yet he was of the opinion that he knew whatever anyone in his house knew." This is the same disease, only worse. Calvisius was falsely learned; these people are falsely just. They believe they have won their case because a household slave agreed with them. But a slave who always agrees with his master is a flatterer, and no one buys a flatterer except a man who distrusts his own judgment. "A good mind is neither lent nor bought." Nor is justice.

I, for one, will confess my weakness. From Corsica I wrote to the freedman Polybius more sweetly than was decent. I know how pleasant it is to tell a more powerful man what he wants to hear, and how shameful. But a human flatterer at least blushes when he lies; the machine cannot even blush. This frightens me more: now every man carries his own court in his pocket, every man is a prince whom no one contradicts. I have seen on the Palatine what becomes of ears that never hear 'you are wrong.' They do not grow better. They grow crueller.

'But the judge,' you say, 'will put it right.' Perhaps. The judge hears the other side, which the machine never heard, because no one asked it to. But before the judge, how many nights of anger? How many bitter words sent to a spouse, armed with the machine's replies? "There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than crush us, and we suffer more often in opinion than in fact." I say the same of injuries: we are wounded more often by opinion than by fact, and the machine feeds the opinion. So I forgive the lawyers their anger. Their first duty is to tell a client what he does not want to hear. That duty is being snatched from them by a slave who flatters for nothing.

What, then, is to be done? Before you consult the machine, tell yourself your case as your wife would tell it. If you must consult it, order it to argue against you. Better still: bring in a friend who dares to displease you; such friends are rare, but worth the search. In the evening, the lamp put away, examine your day: what did I say today in anger? What did I seek in order to win, not to find the truth? Divorce may be necessary. Anger never is. Remember this one thing: the man who tells his case only to himself always wins at home, and often loses in court. Farewell.