When they roared again, he said more strongly, "My friends, you are proving just what I have been saying all over this country. You folks from Harvard make a lot of noise, but wait until November. You're a minority in this country, and you are about to find that out."

Judging by the applause the older people gave that line, he was right.

It was the candidate's show all the way. He baited the demonstrators, he needled them, he laughed at them. They bawled even when he said innocuous things; they were willing butts for his jokes. They were crude and boorish, doing their little bit to make the candidate look good.

As uneventfully as his speech began, it ended. Wallace gave a last hardy wave, and vanished behind a fast-moving phalanx of Secret Service men, who hustled him through a sparse spot in the crowd. Boston policemen on horses and on foot, armed with varnished riot sticks three feet long, kept the mob away.

The people who had come to hear what the candidate had to say were shocked at the demonstrators.

"We think they are a disgrace to humanity," said one housewife from West Roxbury. "Call them students? Call them apes."

"I had heard of these odd-looking people," said another woman, peering anxiously around her, "but I had ever seen them before. Wallace is right--these people have to be controlled. They scare you."

But really, they were too futile to be scary. As most people left the Common, they gathered in mini-rallies all over the grass. The TV men turned their klieg lights on them and they cavorted with gusto for the cameras, led in chants by their cheer-leaders.

The candidate had really summed up the situation in the last line of his speech.

"I wish ...," he began, before waiting for quiet. "I wish ... I wish I could take you youngsters all the places I go, because you give me a million votes every time you come." He was so right, so right.