legation and charge" d'affaires at Paris, France, 1874-81; assistant secretary of state under Secretary Blaine, 1881, and resigned with his chief in December, 1881, after the death of President Garfield.
He was elected November 7, 1882, representative from the fifth district of Illinois to the forty-seventh Congress as successor to Representative R. M. A. Hawk, deceased, and he has been continuously reelected from the same district, afterward numbered the ninth and thirteenth following the census of 1890 and that of 1900. In congress he was a member of the Republican minority in the committee on Foreign Affairs, 1883-90, and was chairman of the committee or leader of the Republican majority from 1890; and he also served on the committee on Insular Affairs and other minor committees. He is a positive and systematic protectionist. He was one of the first to urge the observance of the treaty stipulations with the Chinese in exclusion legislation; made an earnest and compact speech in the house on "Commercial Union with Canada"; and prevented a rupture with Mexico in 1888 by carefully investigating and explaining the Cutting matter in a way that caused the house to refuse its endorsement of the proposed threatening demand upon Mexico. He secured the adoption by the house in March, 1889, of a resolution contemplating complete commercial union with Canada, which he claimed, if once in operation, would ultimately result in permanent harmony if not ultimate union of the two countries. He exposed what he designated as the fallacy of President Cleveland's Canadian retaliation message, September 4, 1888, in a speech to which Representative Bourke Cockran replied. He supported the interstate commerce, law, taking an exception to the bill, viz., to the "long and short haul clause." In 1890 he and Representative Springer were made the two Illinois members of the special committee on the World's Fair, upon the fourth centennial of the discovery of America, and they supported the claims of Chicago before the house, February 20, 1890, as the best site for the exposition and on the seventh vote Chicago received 156 votes, exactly a majority. He pleaded the cause of the Cuban revolutionists December 14, 1895, and submitted a resolution to accord them the rights of belligerents and to offer friendly offices to Spain to secure their recognition as an independent state, which passed the house 246 to 27. He supported various bills to promote reciprocity and increase trade with the other American republics; obtained the passage of a resolution recognizing the
