110 The Thirty-third General Meeting. 
the area enclosed let there be some authority such as was given under 
Sir John Lubbock’s Act, making it a legal offence to injure any 
part of the grand old monument. A light iron fence that would 
hardly be seen from a distance was, to his mind, preferable to either 
a ha-ha or a heavy impregnable mass of iron railing. Of course 
they must always have within it someone to represent the law. In 
that way they might defend Stonehenge from human depredators. 
Rabbits might be kept out by a rabbit fence 4ft. high, attached to 
the other fence, and sunk a few inches into the ground. The law 
was always a stronger fence than any of a material description. He 
believed that the national sentiment in favor of preserving a 
place like Stonehenge, would, when such a symbol of authority 
was put up, with a man inside it—a policeman, if they liked—with 
authority to arrest an offender and to assert the law, be found to be 
the most economic and effectual way of performing this national duty. 
Touching on that part of the report about replacing some of the 
stones: no doubt they would have a great outcry about this; for 
there were many people who thought that to replace a pinnacle on 
a Church tower, or an old monument that was lost, was a sort of 
sacrilege. He confessed he was not one of those. He thought if 
they could really restore, in the true sense of the word—replacing— 
it was the best duty they could perform towards an ancient monu- 
ment. The great trilithon that fell in 1797 could undoubtedly be 
replaced where it was without any difficulty ; and with regard to 
the leaning stone, which the deputation did not propose to restore, 
he confessed he never looked at it without trembling. Any day 
something might happen—a rabbit burrowing beneath it, or a frost 
coming after much rain, or anything that should just shake the 
small bit of earth that held the stone in its place, and that stone 
would come down and crush one of the most interesting stones of 
Stonehenge. Therefore, he maintained that they ought to do some- 
thing to keep it in its place, or to endeavour to bring it a little 
more into the perpendicular. The rubble beneath the stones being 
undermined ought to be replaced with best modern cement, and 
they could be then kept in their places without interference with the 
aspect of the monument, or the position of the stones: and it might 
