He was the first chairman of its council, and, except during his tour in India in 1888, when he brought the Institute to the notice of the Indian authorities, he was hardly absent from a single meeting. For his special services in this connection he received the Order of the Bath in 1893, this being the only instance of a Lord Chancellor being decorated with an order. In 1893 he became, at its foundation, president of the Society of Comparative Legislation. In 1897 he was appointed, jointly with Lord Justice Collins, to represent Great Britain on the Venezuela Boundary Commission, which met in Paris in the spring of 1899. Such a complicated business involved 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 adjudicate in the Alaska boundary dispute and to adjust boundaries 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 the US in July of that year, and was received cordially at Washington D.C.. His fellow commissioners elected him their president. In February 1899, while the commission was in full swing, Herchell slipped in the street and fractured his pelvis. 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 1 March, only two weeks after the accident, he died at the Shoreham Hotel, Washington, a post-mortem examination revealing heart disease. John Hay, United States Secretary of State, at once telegraphed to Joseph Hodges Choate, the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, the deep sorrow felt by President William McKinley. Sir Wilfrid 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 where he had been married. Herschell left a widow whom he had married in 1876, Agnes Adela, daughter of Edward Leigh Kindersley and granddaughter of Vice-Chancellor Kindersley.