2nd—­The principles of speech and the un-normal condition known as stammering have been surrounded with a great deal of mystery in the years gone by.  The idea has been widely prevalent that the affliction was one sent by Providence as a punishment for some act committed by the sufferer or his forbears.  This and many other ideas bordering upon superstition, are responsible, too, to a great degree for the belief that stammering is incurable.

3rd—­Even if an attempt to cure stammering was made, this attempt was based upon the “supposition” that stammering was a physical trouble, due to some defect in the organs of speech.  It followed that since no one was ever able to discover any physical defect, no one knew the true cause of the disorder, nor how to treat it successfully.

4th—­Unfortunately there have been in the field a number of irresponsible charlatans, preying upon the stammerer with claims to cure, while in fact they knew little or nothing of the disorder, had never stammered themselves, nor had the slightest knowledge of the correct methods of procedure in the core of stammering.  The failure of such as these to do any good led to a widespread belief that there was no successful method for the eradication of speech disorders.

From an experience covering more than twenty-eight years, during which time the author has corresponded with 210,000 persons who stammer and has personally met and diagnosed about 22,000 cases, it has been proved that all of these beliefs are fallacies of the worst character.  Given any person who stutters or stammers and who has no organic defect and is as intelligent as the average child of eight years, it has been found that the Unit Method of Restoring Speech will eradicate the trouble at its source and by removing the cause, entirely remove the defective utterance.

The stammerer’s case not hopeless:  Stammerers should fix this fact firmly in mind:  Stammering can be cured!  There is hope, positive, definite hope for every case—­this fact is based on every imaginable form of stuttering or stammering.  It is not, in other words, a mere idle statement based on theory or guess-work, but a mathematical truth, taken from experience.

I recall very well the case of a man of 32 who came to me for help after five of the so-called schools for stammerers had failed to afford him any relief.  Quite naturally this man was a confirmed skeptic.  He did not believe that there was any cure for him.  Anyone who had been through the trials that he had experienced would have felt the same way.  But he placed himself under treatment, nevertheless, and in a few weeks’ time, the Unit Method had restored him to perfect speech.  He left entirely convinced that stammering could be cured, because it had been done in his own case which had so long seemed beyond all hope.

Many years afterward, he wrote a letter which I take the liberty of reproducing here for the encouragement and inspiration of everyone who is similarly afflicted and who feels as this man felt—­that he is incurable: