f less so. As previously
explained, this period marks the time when speech disorders progress
rapidly from bad to worse and, as a consequence, the chances for
outgrowing diminished from 1 per cent, before the age of 6 to
practically zero after the age of 12. SUGGESTIONS: There is little that
can be said for the good of the young person at these ages. 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 h