But though the civil strife was ended, the injury it had inflicted was well nigh incurable. It is to be reckoned chief among the causes of the weakness in after years that made it possible—and, in the judgment of some, necessary and justifiable—for the British government to thrust in its strong hand and subvert the independent but tottering republic that it might substitute therefor a more stable colonial administration. The treasury had been impoverished. Taxes were uncollected and irrecoverable. Salaries and other public liabilities were heavily in arrears. Worse than all these, the republic had forfeited the confidence of other nations to that degree that no one believed in its stability. Even its nearest neighbor and sister republic, the Orange Free State, no longer desired union, preferring to stand alone before the constant menace of the Basutos rather than to be joined with a country wherein efficient government seemed to have perished. To make matters still worse, the discord among the whites was turned to advantage by their colored foes. When the several factions in the Transvaal united on Mr. Pretorius as their executive head, in 1864, the white population, all told, did not exceed 30,000—less than one person to three square miles—while the blacks in the same territory numbered hundreds of thousands. During the three years succeeding 1861 the prevailing anarchy made it impossible to give attention to cessions of land agreed to by the Zulu chiefs. In consequence, the boundaries had not been fixed, and these districts remained unoccupied by the whites. With the restoration of something like order in 1864, the government realized that its relations with some of its native neighbors required definition and formal settlement. This was successfully done, and the lines mutually agreed upon between the whites and the native authorities were duly marked. A leading spirit among the Zulus of this time was Cetawayo, a chief of remarkable subtlety and power. In less than two months after the settlement and marking of boundaries in the southern region of the Transvaal Cetawayo found some pretext for repudiating his bargain, appeared on the borders of Utrecht at the head of a Zulu army, in February, 1865, and removed the landmarks so lately set up. During the negotiations that followed, Cetawayo did not appear at any conference, but the presence of his force on the border so far affected the final settlement that the boundary was changed near the Pongolo River, restoring a small district in that region to Zululand.