Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental and English politics a very strong Liberal.  This fact is not a mere detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of the authorship of the “Eikon Basilike” or the authenticity of the Tichborne claimant.  Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the poet’s whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal.  His mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and energy and in the ultimate utility of error.  He held the great central Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest convictions.  The world was going right he felt, most probably in his way, but certainly in its own way.  The sonnet which he wrote in later years, entitled “Why I am a Liberal,” expresses admirably this philosophical root of his politics.  It asks in effect how he, who had found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others.  A Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand.  Browning was a Liberal in this sense.

And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations.  It attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems attached to the life of a man.  The grounds were indeed much the same; no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or must remain useless to the world.  Men remembered how often barbarous tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive the blood of decaying empires and civilisations.  And this sense of the personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war.  But in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as Browning in love with Italy.