Despite the charm of colonial home life, however, the strain of that life upon womankind was far greater than is the strain of modern domestic duties. In New England this was probably more true than in the South; for servants were far less plentiful in the North than in Virginia and the Carolinas. But, on the other hand, the very number of the domestics in the slave colonies added to the duties and anxieties of the Southern woman; for genuine executive ability was required in maintaining order and in feeding, clothing, and caring for the childish, shiftless, unthinking negroes of the plantation. In the South the slaves relieved the women of the middle and upper classes of almost manual labor, and in spite of the constant watchfulness and tact required of the Southern colonial dame, she possibly found domestic life somewhat easier than did her sister to the North. The dreary drudgery, the intense physical labor required of the colonial housewife was of such a nature that the woman of to-day can scarcely comprehend it. Aside from the astonishing number of child-births and child-deaths, aside too from the natural privations, dangers, ravages of war, accidents and diseases, incident to the settlement of a new country, there was the constant drain upon the woman's physical strength through lack of those household conveniences which every home maker now considers mere necessities. It was a day of polished and sanded floors, and the proverbial neatness of the colonial woman demanded that these be kept as bright as a mirror. Many a hundred miles over those floors did the colonial dame travel--on her knees. Then too every reputable household possessed its abundance of pewter or silver, and such ware had to be polished with painstaking regularity. Indeed the wealth of many a dame of those old days consisted mainly of silver, pewter, and linen, and her pride in these possessions was almost as vast as the labor she expended in caring for them. What a collection was in those old-time linen chests! Humphreys, in her _Catherine Schuyler_, copies the inventory of articles in one: "35 homespun Sheets, 9 Fine sheets, 12 Tow Sheets, 13 bolster-cases, 6 pillow-biers, 9 diaper brakefast cloathes, 17 Table cloathes, 12 damask Napkins, 27 homespun Napkins, 31 Pillow-cases, 11 dresser Cloathes and a damask Cupboard Cloate." And this too before the day of the washing-machine, the steam laundry, and the electric iron! The mere energy lost through slow hand-work in those times, if transformed into electrical power, would probably have run all the mills and factories in America previous to 1800.