Thirty-six years had elapsed since the eventful ride of Dick King from D'Urban to Graham's Town. The British colony of Natal had grown slowly. Immigrants arrived; a representative Constitution was granted. During this period numbers of people of Dutch extraction formed settlements in the Orange Free State and Transvaal Republic. The British Government in the first instance established sovereignty over the former country, but abandoned it on the 23rd of February, 1854. The Republic commenced from that date. So far as the Transvaal is concerned, Potgieter established the town of Potchefstroom in 1839, and soon after enormous territory, extending from the Vaal to the Limpopo, came under the dominion of the South African Republic. The first session of Volksraad was held in 1848, and it was in 1852 that Pretorius succeeded in obtaining the treaty at Sand river, by means of which the independence of the Republic was recognized by the British Crown. One of the first Acts of the Volksraad was to repeal a former resolution fixing their southern boundary at the twentyfifth degree of south latitude, because the Volksraad has no means of determining where the said degree of south latitude is. Amongst the people civilization made slow progress. "Not many years ago," wrote Mr. Thomas Baines in his valuable work on the Gold Regions of South Africa, "their own Surveyor-General was mobbed for using a theodolite in the streets of Potchefstroom instead of stepping off the distance like the Veldt Valkt miester of the good old times." Sir Arthur Cunynghame, in his recent narrative, gives us yet more amusing and striking illustrations of the utter simplicity and ignorance of the Boers. As was to be expected under the circumstances, the Government was extremely narrow and objectionable; in proof of which it is only necessary to state that no Englishman or German was allowed to possess landed property, it was forbidden to discover or work minerals, while slavery really existed, and was practised under what was styled the Apprentice Law, passed in 1856.[15] In spite of the discovery of gold-fields at Pilgrim's Rest, the country became insolvent, wars with the natives took place, and at last such a state of insolvency and danger was attained that the British Government found it imperatively necessary to intervene. The Zulus, under Cetywayo, intended to overrun the country, and this would have threatened all British South Africa. The northern territory of the State had already been abandoned to the natives; the Government was powerless, and all confidence in it had fled; commerce was destroyed, and the country was bankrupt. Under these circumstances, Sir Theophilus Shepstone, on the 12th of April, 1877, found himself imperatively obliged to place the Transvaal territory under the protection of the British flag.