the number of women is so great, or the
number of men so small; but if they will have me tell the truth, the
disadvantage of the women is a terrible scandal upon the men, and it
lies here, and here only; namely, that the age is so wicked, and the
sex so debauched, that, in short, the number of such men as an honest
woman ought to meddle with is small indeed, and it is but here and
there that a man is to be found who is fit for a woman to venture upon.

But the consequence even of that too amounts to no more than this, that
women ought to be the more nice; for how do we know the just character
of the man that makes the offer? To say that the woman should be the
more easy on this occasion, is to say we should be the forwarder to
venture because of the greatness of the danger, which, in my way of
reasoning, is very absurd.

On the contrary, the women have ten thousand times the more reason to
be wary and backward, by how much the hazard of being betrayed is the
greater; and would the ladies consider this, and act the wary part,
they would discover every cheat that offered; for, in short, the lives
of very few men nowadays will bear a character; and if the ladies do
but make a little inquiry, they will soon be able to distinguish the
men and deliver themselves. As for women that do not think their own
safety worth their thought, that, impatient of their perfect state,
resolve, as they call it, to take the first good Christian that comes,
that run into matrimony as a horse rushes into the battle, I can say
nothing to them but this, that they are a sort of ladies that are to be
prayed for among the rest of distempered people, and to me they look
like people that venture their whole estates in a lottery where there
is a hundred thousand blanks to one prize.

No man of common-sense will value a woman the less for not giving up
herself at the first attack, or for accepting his proposal without
inquiring into his person or character; on the contrary, he must think
her the weakest of all creatures in the world, as the rate of men now
goes. In short, he must have a very contemptible opinion of her
capacities, nay, every of her understanding, that, having but one case
of her life, shall call that life away at once, and make matrimony,
like death, be a leap in the dark.

I would fain have the conduct of my sex a little regulated in this
particular, which is the thing in which, of all the parts of life, I
think at this time we