Republic of Brazil; in 1893 called the attention of the country to the encroachment of England upon the feeble republic of Venezuela in violation of the Monroe doctrine; and December 18, 1895, he introduced and urged a bill creating a commission to investigate and determine the true divisional line, as President Cleveland had just recommended, which was unanimously passed. In 1894 he arraigned before the house the policy of President Cleveland in Hawaii and in 1898 presented the measure for Hawaiian annexation which passed June 5, 1898; and soon after he was appointed with Senators Cullom and Morgan a commissioner to visit the islands, examine the government and recommend necessary legislation to congress, which resulted in the establishment of the territory of Hawaii. He declined appointment as United States Minister to Spain in 1897. The same year he was a candidate before the Illinois legislature for the United States senate. In 1903, December 11, he defended President Roosevelt's action on the Panama Canal in the first speech discussing it.
He was married October 28, 1874, to Miss Sallie Reynolds, daughter of William F. Reynolds of Lafayette, Indiana. While they were at Paris, France, where he was secetary of legation, their two sons were born, Robert Reynolds Hitt and William Floyd Hitt. Representative Hitt was elected to membership in the National Geographic Society, was a director of the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in 1884, and received the honorary degree of LL.D. from De Pauw university in 1894, and from Mount Morris college, in 1902. He is a regent of the Smithsonian Institution.
