In 1897 he was appointed, jointly with Lord Justice Collins, to represent Great Britain on the Venezuela Boundary Commission, which assembled in Paris in the spring of 1899. So complicated a business involved a great deal of preparation and a careful study of maps and historic documents. Not content with this, he accepted in 1898 a seat on the joint high commission appointed to adjust certain boundary and other important questions pending between Great Britain and Canada on the one hand and the United States on the other hand. He started for America in July of that year, and was received most cordially at Washington. His fellow commissioners elected him their president. In February 1899, while the commission was in full swing, he had the misfortune to slip in the street and in falling to fracture a hip bone. His constitution, which at one time was a robust one, had been undermined by constant hard work, and proved unequal to sustaining the shock. On the 1st of March, only a fortnight after the accident, he died at the Shoreham Hotel, Washington, a _post-mortem_ examination revealing disease of the heart. Mr Hay, secretary of state, at once telegraphed to Mr Choate, the United States ambassador in London, the "deep sorrow" felt by President McKinley; and Sir Wilfred Laurier said the next day, in the parliament chamber at Ottawa, that he regarded Herschell's death "as a misfortune to Canada and to the British Empire." A funeral service held in St John's Episcopal Church, Washington, was attended by the president and vice-president of the United States, by the cabinet ministers, the judges of the Supreme Court, the members of the joint high commission, and a large number of senators and other representative men. The body was brought to London in a British man-of-war, and a second funeral service was held in Westminster Abbey before it was conveyed to its final resting-place at Tincleton, Dorset, in the parish church of which he had been married. Herschell left a widow, granddaughter of Vice-Chancellor Kindersley; a son, Richard Farrer (b. 1878), who succeeded him as second baron; and two daughters.
A "reminiscence" of Herschell by Mr Speaker Gully (Lord Selby) will be found in _The Law Quarterly Review_ for April 1899. _The Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation_ (of which he had been president from its formation in 1893) contains, in its part for July of the same year, notices of him by Lord James of Hereford, Lord Davey, Mr Victor Williamson (his executor and intimate friend), and also by Mr Justice D. J. Brewer and Senator C. W. Fairbanks (both of the United States). (M. H. C.)