The time for home treatment is past.  The simple suggestions offered for the assistance of those in the Formative or Speech-Setting Periods would be of little value here because the growth of the individual has made the eradication of the trouble quite improbable without a complete re-education along correct speech lines—­best obtained from an institution devoting its efforts to that work.  Whatever steps are taken, however, should be taken before the disorder has become rooted in the muscular and nervous system and before it has passed into the Chronic Stage.

CHAPTER XIII

Where does stammering lead?

In answering the question:  “Where Does Stammering Lead?” nothing truer can be found than the words of a man who has stammered himself: 

“What pen can depict the woefulness, the intensified suffering of the inveterate stammerer, confirmed, stereotyped in a malady seemingly worse than death?  Are the afflictions, mental and physical, of the pelted, brow-beaten, down-trodden stutterer imaginary?  Nonsense!  There is not a word of truth in the idea.  His sufferings all the time, day in and day out, at home and abroad, are real—­intense—­purgatorial.  And none but those who have drunk the bitter cup to its dregs feel and know its death, death, double death!  These afflicted ones die daily and the graves to them seem pleasant and delightful.  The sufferings of the deaf and dumb are myths—­but a drop in the ocean compared to what I endured!  And who cared for me?  Who?  I wag the laughing stock, a subject of scoffing and ridicule, often.  I could fill an octavo with the miseries I endured from early childhood till the elapsement of forty summers.”

Thus does the Rev. David F. Newton, himself a stammerer for forty years, speak of stammering and stuttering and its effects.  And Charles Kingsley, a noted English divine and author who stammered, paints the stammerer’s future in words of experience that no stammerer should ever forget: 

“The stammerer’s life is a life of misery, growing with his growth and deepening as his knowledge of life and his aspirations deepen.  One comfort he has, truly, that his life will not be a long one.  Some may smile at this assertion; let them think for themselves.  How many old people have they ever heard stammer!  I have known but two.  One is a very slight ease, the other a very severe one.  He, a man of fortune, dragged on a very painful and pitiful existence—­ nervous, decrepit, asthmatic—­kept alive by continual nursing.  Had he been a laboring man, he would have died thirty years sooner than he did.”

To the man who has never been through the suffering that results from stammering or who has never been privileged to watch the careers of stammerers and stutterers over a period of years, these final results of stammering seem impossible.  The inexperienced observer can only ask in wonder:  “How can stammering or stuttering bring a man or woman to these depths of despair?”