ople, probably about four thousand
adult males; but the characteristics which had enabled them to carry out
their exodus from Cape Colony and their campaigns of conquest against
the natives with so much success made the task of organization still
more difficult. They had in an eminent degree "the defects of their
qualities." They were self-reliant and individualistic to excess; they
loved not only independence, but isolation; they were resolved to make
their government absolutely popular, and little disposed to brook the
control even of the authorities they had themselves created. They had,
in fact, a genius for disobedience; their ideal, if one can attribute
any ideals to them, was that of Israel in the days when every man did
that which was right in his own eyes. It was only for warlike
expeditions, which they had come to enjoy not only for the sake of the
excitement, but also because they were able to enrich themselves by the
capture of cattle, that they could be brought together, and only to
their leaders in war that they would yield obedience. Very few had taken
to agriculture, for which, indeed, the dry soil was seldom fitted, and
the half-nomadic life of stock-farmers, each pasturing his cattle over
great tracts of country, confirmed their dissociative instincts.
However, the necessities of defence against the natives, and a common
spirit of hostility to the claims of sovereignty which the British
government had never renounced, kept them loosely together. Thus several
small republican communities grew up. Each would have preferred to
manage its affairs by a general meeting of the citizens, and sometimes
tried to do so. But as the citizens dispersed themselves over the
country, this became impossible, so authority, such slight authority as
they could be induced to grant, was in each vested in a small elective
assembly called the Volksraad or Council of the People.

These tiny republics were held together by a sort of faintly federative
tie, which rested rather in a common understanding than upon any legal
instrument, and whose observance was always subject to the passion of
the moment. The communities which dwelt to the north-east, beyond the
Vaal River, while distracted by internal feuds chiefly arising from
personal or family enmities, were left undisturbed by the colonial
government. They lived hundreds of miles from the nearest British
outpost, and their wars with the Kafirs scarcely affected those tribes
wit