Yet in the past, not one of these knew what was coming. Not one realized where the trail was leading. No stammerer can of himself see into the future. But he can, at least, look into the future of others, who, like himself, are stammerers, and avoid the pitfalls into which they have fallen and save himself the mistakes they have made. PART III THE CURE OF STAMMERING AND STUTTERING CHAPTER I CAN STAMMERING REALLY BE CURED? It has only been a few years since the impression was abroad that stammering was incurable. Not a particle of hope was held out to the afflicted individual that any semblance of a cure was possible by any method. This erroneous idea that stammering could not be cured grew up in the mind of the average person as a result of one or all of the following conditions: 1st--The inability of the stammerer to cure himself and his further inability to outgrow the trouble, (although he was repeatedly told that he would outgrow it) was the first reason that led to the foolish and totally unfounded belief that stammering could not be cured. 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.