istrustful groups, gave rise to personal rivalries
among the leaders and bitter feuds among the adherents of each faction,
resembling those which used to distract a city republic in ancient
Greece or medieval Italy. The absence of any effective government had
attracted many adventurers from various parts of South Africa, who
wandered as traders or hunters through the wilder parts of the country
and along its borders, men often violent and reckless, who ill-treated
the natives, and constituted not only a public scandal, but, by the
provocations which they gave to the Kafir chiefs, a danger to the peace
of the adjoining British territories, as well as to that of the
Transvaal itself.

From their first settlement beyond the Vaal in the years immediately
following the Great Trek of 1836, the farmers, though considering
themselves to form one people, had been grouped in several small
communities. In 1852 there were four such, those of Potchefstroom,
Utrecht, Lydenburg, and Zoutpansberg, each having its Volksraad
(people's council) and president or executive head, while a sort of
loosely federative tie linked them together for the purposes, not of
internal administration, but of defence against common foes.

In 1857 the Potchefstroom people tried to conquer the Orange Free State,
then in the third year of its life, but desisted on finding that the
infant Republic was prepared to defend itself. A single Volksraad for
all the communities beyond the Vaal had been chosen as far back as 1849;
but respect for authority grew very slowly, and for a time it could not
be said to represent more than a party. In 1852, however, it ratified
the Sand River Convention, and in 1855 it appointed a commission to
draft a complete body of law. Finally, in 1858, an instrument called the
"Grondwet," or Fundamental Law, was drawn up by a body of delegates
named (by a "Krygsraad," or War Council) for that purpose. This
instrument was revised and adopted by the Volksraad, and presently
received the adhesion of two of the semi-independent communities, those
of Potchestroom and Zoutpansberg, and in 1860 also of those at Lydenburg
and Utrecht, which had by that time united. It has been since several
times modified, and the question whether it is to be deemed a truly
rigid constitution, like that of the United States or that of the Swiss
Confederation, has given rise to much controversy.[25] A civil war broke
out in 1862, and the country can hardly be sa