In a few days after this, Rose Fuller moved to refer to the committee the petitions of the merchants on the severe clogs laid on the American trade. Grenville, as madly in earnest as Pitt was affectedly so, vehemently opposed that motion, and called it a _sweeping resolution_. They would next attack, he supposed, the _sacred_ Act of Navigation. Burke bitterly, and Beckford and Dowdeswell, ridiculed him on the idea of any Act being sacred if it wanted correction. Lord Strange went farther; said, he would speak out; should be for a free port in America, and for altering that part of the Act of Navigation that prohibited the importation of cotton not the growth of our own islands.[254] Charles Townshend said he was sorry to find that convenience was to give way to dignity. For his part he would call for a review of the Act of Navigation. This drew on warm altercation between him and Grenville, in which it was no wonder that Townshend’s wit and indifference baffled Grenville’s tediousness and passion. The idea of a free port in America had been taken up by the Ministers, and that intention was now declared to the hearty satisfaction of the merchants. But this plan too, to humour Beckford’s local interests and his own spleen to the Ministers, was harshly and inconsiderately censured by Pitt, but with ill-success to his popularity, the scheme being grateful to the City. He was not more fortunate in his next step. The Ministers thinking themselves bound to give the last blow to General Warrants, which had now been decided in Westminster Hall to be illegal, moved a resolution of their being illegal and a breach of privilege. Grenville, hoping to squeeze out a little popularity from the same measure, moved to bring in a bill for taking them entirely away. This happening while Mr. Pitt was in his hostile mood, he seconded Grenville’s motion; but his lending himself thus to the champion of those warrants, highly offended the Ministerial Whigs, and drew on him much severity from Sir George Saville and Lord John Cavendish. Norton told Mr. Pitt privately that he had got from Carteret Webbe Mr. Pitt’s three warrants, and offered them to him; but Pitt refused to accept them, and said he had always declared he would justify his own warrants. At the same time he dropped to him that he wondered he (Mr. Pitt) had not understood Lord Bute’s speech on the Stamp Act. The Opposition, to purge Lord Temple from being the instigator of Wilkes in his attacks on the Scotch and the Tories, now produced a letter from the former to the latter, dissuading him from such national and general acrimony. This letter had been seized among Wilkes’s papers. But if it palliated the disposition to mischief in the one brother, it laid open the malice of the other; and Grenville was severely tasked for having connived at Webbe’s suppressing this letter in enmity to his brother. Mr. Pitt avowed to the House that he thought Carteret Webbe gently dealt with in not being expelled.