But Fox instantly opposed it with extreme vehemence, declaring that the appointment of such a committee would be a pure waste of time.  It was notorious, he affirmed, that no precedent existed which could have any bearing on the present case, since there was in existence a person such as had never been found on any previous occasion, an heir-apparent of full age and capacity to exercise the royal authority; and he declared it to be his deliberate opinion that the Prince of Wales had “as clear and express a right to assume the reins of government, and to exercise all the powers of sovereignty, during the illness and incapacity of the sovereign, as if that sovereign were actually deceased.”  Such an assertion of indefeasible right was so totally at variance with the Whig doctrines which Pitt, equally with Fox, regarded as the true principles of the constitution, that Pitt at once perceived the advantage which it gave him, by enabling him to stand forward as the supporter of the supreme authority of Parliament, which Fox had by implication denied.  He instantly replied that to assert an inherent indefeasible right in the Prince of Wales, or any one else, independently of the decision of the two Houses, fell little short of treason to the constitution; but, at the same time, to prevent any one pretending to misconceive his intentions, he allowed it to be seen with sufficient plainness that, when once the right of Parliament to appoint the Regent had been established, he should agree in the propriety of conferring that office on the Prince of Wales.  The committee was appointed; but, even before it could report the result of its investigations, the doctrine advanced by Fox had been the subject of discussion in the House of Lords, where Lord Camden, who had presided over the meeting of the Privy Council a few days before, on moving for the appointment of a similar committee of peers, had taken occasion to declare that, if Fox had made such an assertion as rumor imputed to him, it was one which had no foundation in “the common law of the kingdom.”  He had never read nor heard of such a doctrine.  Its assertors might raise expectations not easily laid, and might involve the country in confusion.  And he contended, as Pitt had done in the Commons, that its assertion was a strong argument in favor of the appointment of a committee, that it might be at once seen whether it were warranted by any precedent whatever.  The reports of the two committees bore out Fox’s statement, that no precedent entirely applicable to the case before them had ever occurred.  But by this time Fox had learned that the argument which he had founded on it was in the highest degree unpalatable both to Parliament and to the nation; and for a moment he sought to modify it by an explanation that, though he had claimed for the Prince “the naked right, he had not by that expression intended to maintain that that right could be reduced into possession without the consent of Parliament;” an explanation not