NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE general result of the week's news from the front is highly satisfactory. Lord Roberts telegraphed on Friday morning that General Ian Hamilton's column had reached Springs—thirty miles east of Johannesburg, and twenty miles north of Heidelberg—on Thursday, where it would join hands with Beller, who had arrived at Paardekop the same day, and would be at Standerton on Saturday, thus opening communication between Pretoria and that town, and effectually preventing any joint action between the Trans- vaalers and people in the Orange River Colony. He also reports a great surrender of rifles in the Rustenburg district, where Commandant Steyn and two "actively hostile" field-comets have been captured, but where General Baden-Powell reports that the leading Boers are very pacific and cordial. President Kruger remains on the Delagoa Bay' line, a somewhat pathetic figure, living in a saloon carriage, which is provided with an apparatus for pro- ducing paper money and a printing press for setting forth consolatory, if not veracious, bulletins describing Boer victories. General Rundle still watches the Boers near Ficksburg, and General Beller, having repaired the tunnel at Laing's Nek, is, as we have seen, nearing Standerton. On the whole, there seems no reason to doubt that the great operations of the war are over. The Boer forces still in the field only number about nine thousand men in all, and they are cut in two by the line between Laing's Nek and Pretoria being now in our hands. Those to the south of it must ultimately fall into the power of Methuen and Rundle. Those to the north will be eaten up by Lord Roberts's own troops. No doubt there will be a month's more guerilla warfare, and guerilla warfare always means ambuscades, but the compete subjugation of the Boers is now hi sight
