The learned gentleman, he supposed, would allow that there might be seditious libels without treason in them. It was shallow, the artifice of attempting to draw in gentlemen to condemn seditious warrants by coupling the word _treasonable_ to them, which aggravates the offence; but by not daring to let the question stand simply on its own merits, on the case of a general warrant issued against a seditious libel, not a treasonable one, they tacitly avowed that the libel not being treasonable, their own conduct had been illegal. But no general warrant to search universally without specification of name or place, was allowable, even in case of treason. _General warrants are always wrong_; yet if this amendment left the House at liberty to debate on the whole question, and not on that amendment solely, he would not be against the stating those words. Hay was hurt, and said he had nowhere been accustomed to the manœuvre of quibbles: he had only affirmed that general warrants had been produced in other courts: he had not said that those courts had decided on them. Conway pursued Pitt’s argument, and showed how totally the original question and the proposed alteration of it differed; that if anything could authorize a general warrant, it was treason. By inserting that word, the Ministers betrayed the badness of their own cause; he feared they were a little tender; that they could not bear the last division. He honoured the lights of the law, but feared the House had a little too much of them: yet could those learned men prove that treason and sedition were the same? Why was it necessary, too, to describe historically what had been the custom? The case was clear and simple, when a gentleman came and slipped in a word that totally varied the argument: it was _white_, he inserts the word _black_; and thus would vote that the Ministers had not done wrong by taking up a man for a crime of which he had not been guilty. If a general warrant is good against treason, and not against sedition, and yet you couple them, and make them one crime, are Ministers blameless for inflicting on sedition the punishment only due to treason? Separate the questions, and vote, if you can, that the warrant was legal.