The sustained momentum of this advance, achieved in very little over a month, testifies at once to the solidity {p.315} of the preparations of the British leader, and to the fruitlessness of such disseminated operations, by small bodies, as were conducted by the Boers during the British halt at Bloemfontein, and are now being carried on by Botha and De Wet.
Subsidiary to the greater plan of a campaign by massed forces, they have their advantage; as a main dependence, they merely protract the agony of endurance and suffering.
Sir Redvers Buller had to await in Natal the movement of the central mass of the British force in the Orange Free State.

Towards the middle of May his advance began, directed against the positions which the Boers had taken upon the Biggarsberg mountains, and on the 15th he reoccupied Dundee and Glencoe.

Into the detail of these movements it is not proposed to enter.

The retirement of the Boer forces before Roberts, in the Free State, uncovered the flank and endangered the communications of their brethren on the other side of the mountains.
There was therefore for these nothing to do but to fall back, abandoning with a show of opposition positions whence otherwise they might have inflicted {p.316} considerable loss upon the superior force assaulting them.
At the present moment, July 26, the British have communication from Johannesburg and Pretoria to the sea-coast by two routes--to Cape Town and to Durban.

The actions of the Boers show that it is not in their power seriously to incommode either the one or the other.