The most commonly heard part of the speech is the famous quote,
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
The entire speech is given below.
Strange and impressive associations
rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body
in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of
mighty kings and war-like nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through
the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the
power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the
innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to
whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.
This was the most famous university of mediaeval Europe at a time when no one
dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of
human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at a time when
my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders,
ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron
unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what
has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame
the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations
engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom
which where once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who
dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the
same hostile forces with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of
our race. The primaeval conditions must be met by the primaeval qualities which
are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by
humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In
conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the
rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the
hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage
men and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can
develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of
fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the
hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of
the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the
heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the
civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of their
successors and supplanters, and then their children and their children and
children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The
conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good
qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant,
self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to
its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the
hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that
of the older nations; although these themselves have likewise already entered on
the age of a complex and predominantly industrial civilization.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn
back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which
perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough
battles for the continent their children inherit. The leaders of thought and of
action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly,
sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation
or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it
the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought
can in part be developed afresh from what is roundabout in the New World; but it
can developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old
World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning,
such as this is where I speak to-day. It is a mistake for any nation to merely
copy another; but it is even a greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any
nation, not to be anxious to learn from one another and willing and able to
adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and
productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of Gamaliel
of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his
turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one
subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen,
because you and we a great citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic
republic such as ours - an effort to realize its full sense government by, of,
and for the people - represents the most gigantic of all possible social
experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and
evil. The success or republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our
failure of despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the
quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government,
under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is
all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high
enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career, and add
substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of
average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in
working out the final results of that type of national greatness. But with you
and us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the
long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the
average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary,
every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call
for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics
are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main
source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in
the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best
to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average
cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any
democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in
this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of
sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like
you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity
for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance
for enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To
you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet
there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both
men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and
position should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are
especially liable; and if yielded to, their- your- chances of useful service are
at an end. Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that
queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the
man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as
one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men
who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine
themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even
attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than
he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief
toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble
effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of
thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never
tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with
life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to
think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their
part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of
contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves
in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle
of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out
how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them
better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face
is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who
comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and
shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great
enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at
the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst,
if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never
be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into
fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.
Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of
usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with
their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is
done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others
who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions
of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts
the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop,
or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing
of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty
enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these
men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only
that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength.
It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and
valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the
young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant
soldier."
France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the most
important lesson is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic
and literary development is compatible with notable leadership im arms and
statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries
been proverbial; and during these same centuries at every court in Europe the
"freemasons of fashion: have treated the French tongue as their common
speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to
appreciate that marvelous instrument of precision, French prose, had turned
toward France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and
letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest
masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of
Roland's doom and the vengeance of Charlemange when the lords of the Frankish
hosts where stricken at Roncesvalles. Let those who have, keep, let those who
have not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet
let us remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need
of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body
stands character - the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a
man's force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in
exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical
development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all
the people a good education. But the education must contain much besides
book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness
and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for
the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common
sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in
conjunction with others, courage and resolution - these are the qualities which
mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save
itself from being controlled from the outside. I speak to brilliant assemblage;
I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest
intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and
specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of
all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace,
every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to
fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The need that the average
man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few
people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill
a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness;
for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially
non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work
should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of
indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be
trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a
contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if
he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of
contempt, an object of derision. In the next place, the good man should be both
a strong and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able
to serve his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning
philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only
if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful
thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime
because it is unjust, not because it is a war. The choice must ever be in favor
of righteousness, and this is whether the alternative be peace or whether the
alternative be war. The question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or
war? The question must be, Is it right to prevail? Are the great laws of
righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile
people must be "Yes," whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should
always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be
made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of
trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or
ought to submit to wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than
ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any
nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of
blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest
of all curses in is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all
condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential
in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of
healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If that is
not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a
great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and wilful fault, then
it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and
self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long
run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics,
if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves form the thraldom
of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the
willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our
achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no
delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no
sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the
loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues
the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race. Character must show
itself in the man's performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty
he owes the state. The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family;
and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to
material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to
build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after
this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being.
He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength
be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter
which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose
enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him;
who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep
his wife in comfort or educate his children.
Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely
acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material
well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis
insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and
that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised
the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere
multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country;
and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his
wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use- and such is often
the case- why, then he does become an asset of real worth. But it is the way in
which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles
him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human
activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places cannot be supplied by
any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have
ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to the
reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists
without the service having been rendered, then admiration will only come from
those who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of
tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of
increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things
that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire
a false standard of success; and their can be no falser standard than that set
by the deification of material well-being in and for itself. But the man who,
having far surpassed the limits of providing for the wants; both of the body and
mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune,
for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to
the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being
desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community: that he is to be neither
admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the
scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those
whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every
civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and
in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are
fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that
there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand,
for property belongs to man and not man to property. In fact, it is essential to
good citizenship clearly to understand that there are certain qualities which we
in a democracy are prone to admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights
to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made
of them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts - the
gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the money touch I
have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate degree is essential.
It may be useful when developed to a very great degree, but only if accompanied
and controlled by other qualities; and without such control the possessor tends
to develop into one of the least attractive types produced by a modern
industrial democracy. So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a
leader of opinion in democracy should be able to state his views clearly and
convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is
enable the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to put false
values on things, it merely makes him power for mischief. Some excellent public
servants have not that gift at all, and must merely rely on their deeds to speak
for them; and unless oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good
common sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the
better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives. Indeed, it
is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to
be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for
themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand. The
phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker, however great his power,
whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is
simply a noxious element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public
if he has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard to
the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force to the
orator's latter-day and more influential brother, the journalist. The power of
the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration
because of that power unless it is used aright. He cna do, and often does, great
good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all
writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of
their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it.
Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen,
are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community
through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid
triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and
conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it
and that demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were
advanced by purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations. In short, the
good citizen in a republic must realize that the ought to possess two sets of
qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those
qualities which make for efficiency; and that he also must have those qualities
which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if
he is inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom
all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependant upon a
sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life for
the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is
likewise rendered immune from robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic
must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has
the ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight
hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.
But if a man's efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the
more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic.
Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more
evil if they are merely used for that man's own advancement, with brutal
indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the
community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes
regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no
difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It
makes no difference whether such a man's force and ability betray themselves in
a career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular
leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he
should be despised and condemned by all upright and far-seeing men. To judge a
man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large
habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked
man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis
free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such
admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty. The homely virtues
of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good
housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and
father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course
many other must be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great.
Good citizenship is not good citizenship if only exhibited in the home. There
remains the duties of the individual in relation to the State, and these duties
are none too easy under the conditions which exist where the effort is made to
carry on the free government in a complex industrial civilization. Perhaps the
most important thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of
ordinary citizens, has to remember in political life is that he must not be a
sheer doctrinaire. The closest philosopher, the refined and cultured individual
who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions,
is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still
more the mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises what by
no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in
practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they
have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to
realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor
than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with
stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give
effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to
the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the
ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him
when he does work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and
contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will
do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the
ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember also that the worth of the
ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be
realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose
practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its
expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards
of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body of
politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real
ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the
enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we
should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we continually
find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative
can, under changed conditions, be performed with better results by common
effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a
hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every
one who is not cursed with the pride of the closest philosopher will see, if he
will only take the trouble to think about some of our closet phenomena. For
instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house
can be left to attend to its own drainage and water-supply; but the mere
multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems which, because
they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree, but in kind from
the old; and the questions of drainage and water-supply have to be considered
from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to
decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical
experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely
pointless, because of the failure to agree on terminology. It is not good to be
a slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance,
and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the
State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things
better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism which
finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the
growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or
destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits
the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any
man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to
turn the tool-user more and more into the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that
they can be more equitably borne. The deadening effect on any race of the
adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it
would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage,
fouler immortality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may
not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given
set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would
be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. We
should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the
assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should
strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of
preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man
of the plain people, blood of their blood, and bone of their bone, who all his
life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, at the end died for them, who
always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them,
spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound
common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local significance):
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Disclaimer
As far as I know all the information presented above is correct and I have attempted to ensure that it is. However, I am not responsible for any errors, omissions, or damages resulting from the use or misuse of this information, nor for you doing something stupid with it. (Don't you hate these disclaimers? So do I, but there are people out there who refuse to be responsible for their own actions and who will sue anybody to make a buck.)
Updated 2010-10-30