We investigate consequences of the effective colour-dielectric formulation of lattice gauge theory using the light-cone Hamiltonian formalism with a transverse lattice [1] . As a quantitative test of this approach, we have performed extensive analytic and numerical calculations for 2 + 1-dimensional pure gauge theory in the large N limit. We study the structure of coupling constant space for our effective potential by comparing with results available from conventional Euclidean lattice Monte

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... lo simulations of this system. In particular, we calculate and measure the scaling behaviour of the entire low-lying glueball spectrum, glueball wavefunctions, string tension, asymptotic density of states, and deconfining temperature. The recent Euclidean Lattice Monte Carlo (ELMC) simulations of Teper [2] have shown that pure non-Abelian gauge theory behaves much the same way in three as in four dimensions: a discrete set of massive boundstates are generated by a linearly confining string-like force. Moreover, Teper has performed calculations for N = 2, 3, and 4, allowing an extrapolation to large N . The large-N limit is convenient, though not essential, for our Light-Cone Transverse Lattice (LCTL) formulation. Our formulation offers the rare possibility of describing the parton, constituent, and string behaviour of hadrons in one framework. The relationship between these pictures, each very different but equally successful, remains one of the outstanding enigmas of QCD. We characterise a dielectric formulation as one in which gluon fields, or rather the SU (N ) group elements they generate, are replaced by collective variables