check the sentence. Here, as often, the pronoun seems to be added to restore an ill-balanced sentence; but that can be done in several other ways. In the Richardson sentence also the 'it' should go.
More commonly, the repetition of the antecedent in another form results from the superstitious avoidance of a preposition at the end:
A demand by Norway for political separation, to which Sweden will not assent, but will not go to war to prevent it.—Times.
'To (which)' is not common to both coordinates: accordingly the writer finds it necessary to give 'it' in the second. But, even if we respect our superstition, and exclude 'which Sweden will not assent to, but will not go to war to prevent', we have still the two possibilities of (1) complete relative coordination, 'to..., but which...'; (2) subordination, 'though she will not go to war to prevent it'.
In our next example, Lord Rosebery, again for fear of a preposition at the end, falls into the trap clumsily avoided by the Times writer:
That promised land for which he was to prepare, but scarcely to enter.
So perhaps Bagehot, though his verb may be conceive of:
English trade is carried on upon borrowed capital to an extent of which few foreigners have an idea, and none of our ancestors could have conceived.
(iii) When the relative is the subject of both coordinates, or the object of both, its repetition in the second is a matter of choice. But to omit the relative when it is in a different case from the first is a gross, though not uncommon, blunder. The following are instances:
A league which their posterity for many ages kept so inviolably, and proved so advantageous for both the kingdoms of France and Scotland.—Lockhart.
Questions which we either do not put to ourselves, or are turned aside with traditional replies.—Mark Rutherford.
It is just conceivable that in the last of these the subject of 'are' is 'we': if so, the sentence is to be referred to (i) above
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