Benjamin Harrison gained little prestige as the result of the Administration. He had been nominated for his availability, and the campaign songs had said as much of his illustrious grandfather, the hero of Tippecanoe, as of himself. His appointments had pleased neither the politicians nor the reformers, while there was much laughter at the presence in the offices of numerous personal friends and relatives. The most notable of his appointments was the most embarrassing. James G. Blaine, as Secretary of State, found no topic in foreign relations as interesting as the canal had been in his earlier term. The wranglings with Great Britain and Germany over their treatment of naturalized Americans had subsided. The fisheries of the North Atlantic had been temporarily settled by President Cleveland. The regulation of the seal fisheries of Bering Sea brought no new glory to Blaine. There was no doubt that the seal herd of the Pacific was being rapidly destroyed by careless and wasteful hunters from most of the countries bordering on that ocean. On the American islands the herds could be protected, and here they gathered every summer to mate and breed. But the men who hunted with guns at sea, instead of with clubs on land, could not be controlled unless the world would consent to an American police beyond the three-mile limit. In an arbitration with Great Britain, at Paris, Blaine tried to prove that the seals were American, and entitled to protection on the high seas, and that the waters of the northern Pacific were _mare clausum_. The arbitration went against him on every material point. The only episode that threatened war occurred in Chile. Here Harrison had sent as Minister Patrick Egan, a newly naturalized Irishman and follower of Blaine. In a revolution of 1891 Egan sided with the conservative party that lost. His enemies charged him with improper interest in contracts and with instinctive antagonism to British interests in Chile. After the revolution a mob in Valparaiso showed its dislike for Americans by attacking sailors on shore leave. Egan's extreme demands for summary punishment of the rioters were upheld by Harrison, who prepared the navy for war. Finally the Chilean Government was forced to make complete apologies. In the same year an American mob in New Orleans lynched several Italians, and Blaine repelled with indignation the demand that indemnity be accorded before trial and conviction. He could not even promise trial because of the helplessness of the United States in local criminal proceedings. The Italian Minister, Baron Fava, was withdrawn from Washington on this account, and returned only when Congress had healed the breach by making provision for the families of the sufferers.