tains, which separate the coast district from
the inland plateau, at such a distance from the enemy's frontier that
it is impossible for the latter to offer serious resistance before the
comparatively easy rolling country has been reached. It was for this
reason that the decision of the Orange Free State to join in the war,
while it added to the numerical resistance to be encountered by the
British, had for them the compensating advantage that it removed the
necessity of forcing their way over the difficult mountain ranges
which separate Natal from the Transvaal.

With the power of Great Britain to bring into {p.015} the field a
great superiority of numbers, it is at least open to argument that the
Free State, by ceasing to be neutral, relieved the enemy of a
difficulty greater than that which its hostility introduced. It was
for these reasons that the original British plan, as generally
understood, was to make the main invasion along this line. The danger
of Ladysmith, it is commonly and with probability believed, caused the
momentary abandonment of this purpose. Whether the change was at the
moment correct in principle or not, it is evident that Lord Roberts
has reverted to the first intention; a course which enforces its
accuracy with all the weight of his well-earned great renown.

The other railroad system of direct importance to the military
operations of the present war is the single Natal line, from Durban to
Johannesburg and Pretoria, which at Ladysmith throws off a branch to
the westward, crossing the mountains to Bethlehem in the Free State,
and there ends, over sixty miles from the road between Bloemfontein
and Pretoria. The Natal road, having been opened as lately as 1895,
may be considered the {p.016} child of the Gold Fields; prior to the
discovery of which, indeed, there were in the Transvaal neither
products nor consumers enough to give commercial value to a railroad.

The Cape Town line reached Pretoria only in 1892, and it is still
characteristic of all the lines that there is but little local
traffic, either freight or passenger; the roads exist as means whereby
the function of communication, so far discharged by the sea, is
prolonged from the coast to the interior of the continent.

It is not the least noteworthy in the incidents of commercial and
mechanical energy, by which foreign hands have developed the Transvaal
from a poor to a wealthy state, that "all the heavy machinery, the
timber, the