Out of these causes grew the determination to make their civil government absolutely popular, and conditioned, entirely, on the will of the governed. But unity of some kind must be had, for their very existence depended on acting together against the natives, and against the repeated claims of the British government to exercise sovereignty over the region they occupied. The first steps towards instituting civil government were taken in the organizing of several small republican communities, the design being that each should manage its own affairs by a general meeting of all the citizens. It was found, however, as the population spread over the country, that such independent neighborhood governments failed to secure the necessary unity of the whole people in any matter requiring the aggregate strength of the whole people. To remedy this element of weakness and danger, the Africanders instituted a kind of federal bond between the little republican communities, in an elective assembly called the Volksraad—a Council of the People composed of delegates from all the sectional governments. This federative tie was of the weakest—its authority resting upon an unwritten understanding and common consent rather than upon formal articles of confederation, and its meaning being always subject to such interpretation as might be suggested by the error or the passion of the passing moment. The territory beyond the Vaal River, to the far northeast from Cape Colony, was left undisturbed by the British government. The Africanders living there were hundreds of miles from the nearest British outpost. Their wars with the natives projected no disturbing influence upon the tribes with whom the colonial government was in touch and for whose peace and prosperity it felt responsible. Moreover, the British authorities at the Cape were under instructions from the Colonial Office of the home government to rather contract than expand the scope of British influence in South Africa. For these reasons the Cape government cared nothing for what took place in the outlying regions beyond the Vaal, unless, indeed, it was some event calculated to disturb the natives dwelling next the colonial borders. Altogether different, in the esteem of the Cape authorities and of the Colonial office, were the affairs of the region extending southwestward from the Vaal River to the borders of Cape Colony. Within that territory there had been frequent dissensions between Africander communities. And there had been a rapid increase of dangerous elements in the native population. The Basutos had grown powerful. Intermixed with the whites were the Griquas, a half-breed hunting people, sprung from Africander fathers and Hottentot mothers, and partially civilized. The possibility of serious native wars growing out of quarrels between the white emigrants themselves and between them and the mixed colored population was a constant distress to both colonial governors and the home authorities.