e advance thence, in fact, began on the 21st, and on the
23rd was fought its first battle, that of Belmont.

It will be well here to summarize, map in hand, the character and
result of the Boers' operations in this western theatre, during the
priceless five weeks of opportunity secured to them by the
over-confidence, or the remissness, or the forbearance, of their
powerful enemy. The conditions differed from those in the eastern
scene of war--in Natal--because there the just anxiety of the
inhabitants, reflected in that of the colonial and Imperial
governments, had occasioned the concentration of by far the greatest
mass of available British troops.

The exposure of Natal in its more vital and strictly British interests
greatly exceeded that of Cape Colony, where, owing to the remoteness
of the seaboard, near which the British chiefly congregated, the first
of the Boer invasion would fall upon a population strongly sympathetic
with the cause of the enemy, though British in allegiance. Therefore
while this disloyalty was ominous and detrimental {p.110} to the
British cause as a whole, direct injury to British interests was less
immediately threatened. The Cape frontier, accordingly, was left
defenceless, as has been shown; and in a strictly military point of
view it was quite correct thus wholly to neglect one, rather than
weakly to divide between two.

The consequence was that in Natal occurred during ten days the severe
and nearly continuous fighting already narrated, with the result of
shutting up in Ladysmith, on the direct line of any further advance
contemplated by the Boers, a very strong British force; incapable,
doubtless, of taking the field against the vastly superior numbers
confronting it, but most capable, by numbers and position, of
embarrassing any onward movement of the enemy. This aspect of the case
has been too much neglected in the general apprehension.

The British in Ladysmith were doubtless an isolated and endangered
garrison, the relief of which constrained the movements of its friends
away from more proper objectives; but in the early days of the siege,
while {p.111} in the prime of the physical strength afterward drained
away by hunger, and up to the time that reinforcements had arrived to
bar in front the progress of the enemy, it was also to the latter what
Mantua in 1796 was to Bonaparte, and Genoa in 1800 was to the
Austrians prior to Marengo--a force which, if advance were attempted,
w