The Republican Party has been sold down the river so many times in Boston that people are beginning to call it "Showboat." At least this is the charge leveled by a large group of city Republicans against prominent members of the Party who consistently support Democratic candidates. Despairing men like Henry Shattuck, Murray Forbes, Jr., and William Lund, saying that it was suicide to support Republicans candidates, have for years advised giving support to worthy Democrats.

Although they were voted down this year in the Republican City Committee 47-13, they went ahead and joined the New Boston Committee, a non-partisan organization that endorsed seven Democrats and two Republicans. Fine as this choice may sound, it pulled the rug out from under the other three Republicans running. Boston GOP voters (who have never numbered less than 75,000 regardless of how many have registered as such) were misled by the Shattuck-Forbes, Lund endorsement of the NBC into believing that their party was supporting Democrats. This split the GOP vote and three of the five Republican candidates lost out in the primary.

The nine NBC endorsees all placed in the primary's first eighteen with the combined strength of 50,000 votes. If the GOP had marshalled thirty or forty percent of its minimum 75,000 votes behind its five candidates, this support plus the votes picked up in the candidates own wards would probably have been enough to put all five in the primary's top eighteen.

But because of the prominent Republicans this did not happen. Only two Republicans--those endorsed by the NBC--won in last week's primary. One of these, Lee M. Freidman, is shortly to become an octogenarian and therefore has no political future. The other, Perlie Dyer Chase, has spent fourteen years in the City Council which indicates to this writer that he can go no further. Chase is also heartily disliked by City Hall Democrats. Hence, neither Republican will have any political weight on the City Council if elected. Theoretically every man's word should carry as much weight as it has wisdom (indeed it does within the NBC itself), but in Boston politics, unfortunately, political power is most often the deciding factor. Thus the Grand Old Party will have no say in the new City Council.

In cases where GOP support of Democratic candidates is the only way to eliminate arch-crooks from city government, the Shattuck-Forbes-Lund advice is correct. But in a year when Republicans might have won several seats on the Council it amounts to a sellout, one which will render the GOP impotent and futureless.

Granted, the prospects for the Boston Republican Party are not bright as to power or future, but this is scant justification for steadfastly going backwards. No matter how honest an administration is at any point in time, the one-party system engendered by such a sellout is automatically dangerous. A system abhorred by democrats since the beginning of this nation, it produces corruption and irresponsibility in governments originally pure. For all of their sincere and intelligent civic mindedness, the prominent Republicans must bear a share of responsibility in this matter.