Spain at last realized the necessity of yielding to the inevitable. Her debt had been increased by twenty millions sterling, her navy had been almost annihilated and she had gained nothing but an island or two. King Carlos III., who had so long withheld his recognition of the United States and blocked the negotiations for peace, because the American envoys justly demanded that recognition before they could deal with the representatives of Spain, finally yielded to the pressure of the moment and the preliminaries of peace were signed on the thirtieth of November, 1782. By the separate articles of this treaty, the claim of the United States to all the country from the St. Croix to the southwestern Mississippi, from the Lake of the Woods to the St. Mary's, was verified. By a separate article the line of north boundary between West Florida and the United States was defined, in case Great Britain at the conclusion of the war should recover that province. Thus was the republic, the consummation of which King Carlos III. had in his loyalty to the old tradition of sovereignty so zealously tried to prevent, established upon the very continent, which Columbus had discovered, and to the greater part of which Spain had laid claim. If the Spanish king and his cabinet were at all conscious of the analogy presented by comparison of the commercial and other restrictions placed upon both colonies by the kingdoms from which they had sprung, they had reason to be filled with vague apprehensions at the rise of this new and free power among the countries of the world. They could not help seeing in the republic which by a long and tenacious fight had won her independence from the mother country, a neighbor whose example offered a dangerous precedent. Perhaps it was with the intention of forestalling the development of such events in Cuba, as had led to the Declaration of Independence by the colonies to the north, that the Spanish King had some years before begun to remove the restrictions which had for two centuries and more hampered the growth of Cuban commerce and retarded her general development. It was a proof of his own growth towards a more liberal conception of the relations between a country and her colonies, that the removal of these restrictions was effected within so short a time. He opened the trade of Cuba and the other islands of his possessions in America in 1765, and that of Louisiana in 1768 to eight Spanish ports besides Cadiz; he gradually permitted direct trade from the Spanish ports to his dependencies in South and Central America; and in 1782 even allowed New Orleans and Pensacola to trade with French ports that had Spanish consuls.