To insure a genuinely democratic spirit, two pairs were assigned each day for work in the flower garden. Boys were paired with boys and girls with girls; there were usually four children at the garden, each day, rain or shine, if not to work, at least to note conditions and report to their teachers. Some of the girls resented slightly the comrades selected for them, but no real insult was perpetrated by the assignments made. The teachers took turns in sharing the responsibility for management, except when wishing advice on cutting and giving flowers, then all the pupils went to Miss Phelps. Fifty pupils took part in the venture. It solved several social school problems and created a fine spirit of fraternalism among children of varied social standings. When young people reach the high school age, the period in which all the changes of adolescence are most actively going on, they sometimes develop a tendency to form clubs and secret societies which is often disastrous to school discipline. When the clique evil is fully developed, snobbishness and false standards run rife. There must be democracy in the school if the best results are to be obtained, and the clique spirit may work great havoc, especially in a small high school where a well-defined group or clique is necessarily very conspicuous. CASE 133 (HIGH SCHOOL) [Sidenote: Sororities] A high school of about 150 pupils in a prosperous little western town became afflicted with the clique disease. Margaret Hancock, the daughter of one of the town’s most prominent citizens and rather a spoiled child at home, returned from a winter spent in a southern city, where she had gone to a large high school and had been admitted to one of the numerous sororities there. She came back thoroughly imbued with the ideals of the southern high school, which was in the wealthy, aristocratic part of the city and attended by girls who expected to become debutantes in a few years and make “society” their career. This southern high school was a large one and the clique spirit was not so harmful because there were several such groups to offset each other and the pupils were, on the whole, of the same social class. Back in her home town again, Margaret succeeded in organizing a sorority before the first month of the school year had passed. She included in her secret society the girls whom she thought the “nicest” in the school. These girls were the ones who most nearly approached the prospective belles of the southern high school in type—the girls with the most money and the prettiest clothes, the ones whose parents were frequent visitors in Margaret’s home. This clique or sorority included about twenty pupils in its membership and, needless to say, in a school of that size was quite out of place. It was not long before the boys followed the example set by the girls and formed a secret club of limited membership, and then how the two organizations did lord it over the rest of the school!