A legislature, consisting of a Legislative Council and a House of Assembly, was established, both to be elected on a franchise wide enough to include people of any race or color holding the reasonable property qualification. The sole check upon the colonial legislature retained by the imperial government was the right of the British crown to disallow any of its acts considered objectionable, on constitutional or other grounds, by her Majesty’s ministers. The executive power remained, for a time, with the governor and his council, who were appointed by the crown and in no way responsible to the colonial houses. Later, the executive power was taken from the governors and vested in a cabinet of ministers responsible to the colonial legislature and holding office during its pleasure. The range of industries followed by the people of Cape Colony was not enlarged until the discovery of diamonds in 1869. This brought in a sudden rush of population from Europe and America and so inflated trade that the colonial revenue was more than doubled in the next five years. Then began that unparalleled development of mineral resources in South Africa which created immense wealth and furnished the elements of a political situation whose outcome the wisest cannot foresee. With this general view of the condition of Cape Colony in the three decades succeeding the Great Trek of the Africanders, we turn again to the special study proposed and consider the chain of events that led up to the third unfriendly contact between Boer and Briton—this time beginning in the Orange Free State. By the conventions of 1852 and 1854 Great Britain formally relinquished all claim to that part of the interior of South Africa lying to the north of Cape Colony, and recognized the republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. There can be no doubt of the sincerity of the British government in taking this action. The prevailing desires actuating both the parliament and the executive were to be rid of the responsibility and expense of governing these regions, and to leave the two new Africander republics to work out their own destiny in their own way.