21 JANUARY 1911, Page 3

We wish to call attention to the remarkable letter from

Mr. A. W. Richardson, a member of the Society of Friends resident in County Down, which appears in the Times of the 13th inst. Mr. Richardson, while maintaining the view• as a Friend that passive resistance to a Parliament in Dublin would be the wiser method, admits that for those who regard war as at times an inevitable necessity he cannot see in the history of the past any more reasonable ground for forcible resistance than the defence of civil and religious liberty, both of which would be threatened by a Home-rule Parliament. The Scoto-Irish Protestants of the North no longer hate the Roman Catholics with an unreasoning hatred ; but none the less they believe that a system of combined Tammany and Vatican would be the inevitable result of a Home-rule Parlia- ment, and in this struggle they are fighting for all that the true English Liberal bolds dear.