Mr. Chandler's business principles were carried out in his committee work as thoroughly as they had been in his mercantile career. He believed that what was worth doing at all was worth doing well. It was the custom of the Senate Committee on Commerce to assemble formally once a week, for the consideration of such petitions and bills as had been referred to it for action. Whenever the appointed hour for meeting arrived Mr. Chandler was always in his seat, while its other members but rarely displayed anything like his promptitude. It annoyed the chairman to have any one late, and it was his custom to proceed with business as soon as a quorum was present, or if no quorum appeared within fifteen or twenty minutes, to assume that there was one and commence work; no protests against this course were ever made by the tardy or absent members. The location of the room of the Senate Committee on Commerce during Mr. Chandler's whole term of Senatorial service was in the northwest corner of the capitol, on the floor leading to the galleries. Its windows look down upon the city of Washington, with the broad, historic Potomac and the forest-crowned Virginia hills the distance, and the sunset view from them--including the blue glimmering river, the golden gossamer clouds, the green foliage upon the brow of the hills in the extreme horizon--could never be excelled in an artist's most vivid conception. The first bill reported by Mr. Chandler as chairman of the Committee on Commerce was one to provide for the collection of duties on imports and for other purposes. He brought it in five days after the appointment of the committee at the first session of the Thirty-seventh Congress, and asked that it should be put upon its passage at once. A single objection carried it over under the rules until the next day, when it was passed by a vote of 36 to 6. The scope of the bill was extensive. It provided for confiscating to the United States all vessels belonging to rebels, for closing ports of entry in rebellious States, and for the employment of additional revenue cutters. It also authorized the President under certain circumstances to declare by proclamation States, sections, or parts of States, in insurrection against the United States, and prohibited all commercial intercourse between such insurrectionary States, or parts of States, and the rest of the Union so long as the insurrection should continue. It was thus among the earliest and most important of the war measures.