Mr. Fox then declared himself for the Bill though he spoke against almost every part of it; and being afterwards told by Mr. Pelham peevishly, that Pitt’s was the finest speech he ever heard, but that he (Fox) had not spoke like himself; he replied, “I know it; if I had, I should have said ten times more against the Bill;” but he objected that the præmunire clause was a little ambiguously worded, and that if the person who penned it was aware how wrong it was, he indeed deserved to incur all the weight of it. “Can fourteen persons[118],” said he, “have power, and not want more than their share? and if the Regent and her Council should proclaim the young King major a year before the time specified, would not a man in the street who hallooed at such proclamation be liable to a præmunire?” “The crime,” he added, “was too uncertainly described for such heavy punishment, and of all times a minority is the worst to subject the people to penal laws.” He would have had the whole clause omitted, because every man, without being a lawyer, ought to know what the Regent can or cannot do. He asserted, that as the Chancellor is named in the Bill to be necessarily of the Regency, the putting the Great Seal in Commission would violate the Act. If they would not erase the whole clause, he proposed that the punishment annexed should be impeachment, as it could only be meant to come at great persons who should attempt to disturb the Settlement. Mr. Pelham, from the chair, told him angrily that this was not the clause then in debate, but the first clause, which passed without a division about seven o’clock.