Boys who had come in from the country and worked for their board in order to get a high school education were looked down upon and made to feel ashamed of their rural origin and their manner of life. Girls whose clothes were not so fine or so numerous as those of Margaret’s friends were hurt to the quick by the sneers of their classmates and by being left out when invitations to little dances and home parties were being given out. The two clubs soon managed things so that all the class officers were from among their members and all school functions were under their management. The school became not a democracy, but an aristocracy of the narrowest variety. There were so many club functions and good times that school work suffered and these affairs had to be talked over so extensively, by those who had and had not been present alike, that there was more trouble than ever before about whispering and note-writing. Several of the pupils who had been neglected and left entirely out of the social whirl lost interest in school altogether and dropped out. It was thus that the clique spirit upset the morale of the whole school and lowered the quality of the work many degrees. CONSTRUCTIVE TREATMENT The wise teacher will emphasize the school spirit, or even class spirit, in dealing with situations involving the clique evil. Try to make the snobbish ones forget their exclusiveness in their interest in athletics or other contests in which the _best_ man or team wins and in which the _whole_ school is the party to gain or lose by the outcome. As a last resort, the parents of the ringleaders in the cliques should be appealed to, to make their offspring see the folly and the falseness of the standards they are setting up, for snobbish children have generally been more or less encouraged in their snobbish tendencies at home. COMMENTS Children of all grades do their best work when they have interest and enthusiasm for the work and the school. School spirit can be carried to extremes, but in moderation it should be encouraged. The clique evil needs careful, tactful treatment, for the suppression of school societies sometimes leads to the formation of secret organizations imbued with all the mystery and solemnity of the adults’ lodge, which are much harder to eradicate than the open, above-board kind, and seem to be many times more attractive to the adolescent mind. Adolescence is the sensitive age, the age when small slights cut deepest and pride is most easily wounded, as well as the period when secrets and mystery are most alluring. It is positively cruel for the young people of a school to make their classmates suffer as they have the power to do, by organizing good times and meetings from which the majority of the school are excluded. The clique evil is much more likely to develop into serious proportions in a small school of a few hundred than in a large one of a thousand or more.