Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[44] is no better than a local tribunal; in some respects it is worse. The remotest standard of judgment that I ever encountered was that of the late Professor Ko-Kun-Hua, of Harvard University. There was something delicious in looking into his serene and inscrutable face, and in trying to guess at the operations of a highly trained mind, to which the laurels of Plato and Shakespeare were as absolutely unimportant as those of the Sweet Singer of Michigan; yet the tribunal which he afforded could hardly be called cosmopolitan. He undoubtedly stood, however, for the oldest civilization; and it seemed trivial to turn from his serene Chinese indifference, and attend to children of a day like the Revue des deux Mondes and the Saturday Review. If we are to recognize a remote tribunal, let us by all means prefer one that has some maturity about it.

But it is worth while to remember that, as a matter of fact, the men who created the American government gave themselves very little concern about cosmopolitanism, but simply went about their own work. They took hints from older nations, and especially from the mother