but believe that almost twenty years' personal experience as a
stammerer plus more than twenty-eight years' experience in curing
speech disorders has supplied me with an intensely practical,
valuable and worth-while knowledge on which to base this book.

After having stammered for twenty years you have pretty well run
the whole gamut of mockery, humiliation and failure. You
understand the stammerer's feelings, his mental processes and his
peculiarities.

And when you add to this more than a quarter of a century, every
waking hour of which has been spent in alleviating the stammerer's
difficulty--and successfully, too--you have a ground-work of
first-hand information that tends toward facts instead of fiction
and toward practice instead of theory.

These are my qualifications.

I have spent a life-time in studying stammering, stuttering and
kindred speech defects. I have written this book out of the
fullness of that experience--I might almost say out of my daily
work. I have made no attempt at literary style or rhetorical
excellence and while the work may be homely in expression the
information it contains is definite and positive--and what is more
important--it is authoritative.

I hope the reader will find the book useful--yes, and helpful. I
hope he will find in it the way to Freedom of Speech--his
birthright and the birthright of every man.