So, in the following pages I will tell "where I was before I came here." If my style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer.

For fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the Mooseheart School.

My task was to interest men in the abstract problems of child education.

A speaker must entertain his hearers to the end or lose their attention.
And so I taxed my wit to make this subject simple and easy to listen to.
At last I evolved a style of address that brought my points home to the men I was addressing.
After all these years I can not change my style.

I talk more easily than I write; therefore, in composing this book I have imagined myself facing an audience, and I have told my story.