Those who passed over the Drakensberg Mountains joined the bodies of fore-trekkers who had remained on the north side of the mountains, and entered into that great region where no British flag had yet ever waved, which no Englishman had ever dreamed of claiming, and which was left almost desolate and uninhabited as the result of Mosilikatzi's[69] raids. Here they founded their republic, known as the _Transvaal_ or _South African Republic_. [69] Mosilikatsi and Umsilikazi (Umsiligaas, p. 238) are the same person--S.C.C.S. By the Sand River Convention, ratified by Sir George Cathcart in 1852, it was agreed that the English Government should not follow them into the territories north of the Vaal River; that their independence should be recognized; and that there should be no attempt on the part of the British Government to interfere with their government or management of their own affairs. The most interesting point with regard to the South African Boer is his astonishing gift for forming new societies, and, as it were, instinctively creating for himself a new social structure, under whatever conditions he may find himself. The South African Boer forms never a mob. With his curious love of liberty and independent action, he combines a yet more curious instinct for cohesion and inter-action. There is no folk on earth which has exemplified, as this little mixed Teutonic people has done, the ancient Teutonic instinct for combining a high standard of personal freedom with a strong social organization. Take at random a handful of African Boers; let them wander away into some desert and be unheard of for a few years. When you find them again, they are a people organized and inter-acting, with the true old Teutonic institutions--the district gatherings, the central government, the force for defence composed of all the burghers, under their local chiefs--always the same outline preserved, and always instinctive re-adaptations and variations according to the varying conditions of the new society. Studying this matter, one is forcibly reminded of the instinct in a swarm of bees, which, however often removed from spot to spot, still seek at once to deposit their old hexagonal cells, yet always varying the shape of the hive as they are compelled to build it between two plates of glass, in a hollow tree, or in a hand-made hive. To the scientific student of the evolution of human societies nothing in the range of modern history is more interesting and curious than the analytical study of the little states which the South African Boer has always tended to deposit in varied yet kindred forms. In the South African Republic, or Transvaal, the Boer has shaped a social organism singularly strong, and at the same time plastic; the external governing power being responsive to the will of the electorate.