But for the special purpose of determining what place the episode of the severance of the British North American colonies holds in the history of colonization we must look still further afield. The constitutional question as to whether the colonies were subject to the Parliament of the mother country or to the Crown alone may, from this particular point of view, be omitted, for the story of the troubled years abundantly shows that theories would have slept, if certain practical difficulties had not called them into waking existence, and if lawyers had not been so much to the front, holding briefs on either side. Nor is it necessary to dwell upon the specific and immediate causes of the strife, except so far as they were ultimate causes also. Among such immediate causes, some of which have been already noted, were the personal character of the English king for the time being, the corruption and jobbery of public life in England, the weakness of the Executive in the colonies, the enforcing of commercial restrictions already placed by the mother country on the colonies, the kind of new taxes which the Home Government imposed, the method of imposing them, and the object with which they were devised; the outrageous laws of 1774 for penalizing Massachusetts, the Quebec Act, and the employment of German mercenaries against the colonists, which gave justification to the colonists for calling in aid from France. All these and other causes might have been powerless to affect the issue, if England had possessed statesmen and generals, and if the growing plant of disunion had not been deeply rooted in the past. [Sidenote: Comparison of Spanish and British colonization in America.] [Sidenote: Spain held her American possessions for a longer time than Great Britain held the North American colonies.] When France lost Canada and Louisiana, two European nations, other than the Portuguese in Brazil, practically shared the mainland of America. They were Spain and Great Britain. Spain won her American empire not far short of a hundred years before Great Britain had any strong footing on the American continent; she kept it for some thirty or forty years after the United States had achieved their independence. The Spanish-American empire was therefore much longer-lived than the first colonial dominion of Great Britain in North America, and the natural inference is, either that the Spaniards treated their colonies or dependencies better than the English treated theirs, or that the English colonies were in a better position than the Spanish dependencies to assert their independence, or that both causes operated simultaneously.