There’s no such way of Publishing or Proclaiming any thing, as by
Enjoining a Woman under the Seal of Confession to keep it Secret. They
that are Curious to _know_ forbidden Secrets, are as Frank of Telling
them again, and of Enlarging them: So that whoever shews me a very
Inquisitive Body, I’ll shew him a Blab, and one that shall make a Privacy
as Publick as a Proclamation. But if your Wife will have it so, and calls
for a Categorical Answer, [_Will ye tell me, or will ye not?_] If you
tell the Secret, ’tis odds but in Twelve Hours it shall be Town-Talk,
and be made Thirteen times more then ’tis. If you refuse to tell it,
there’s no enduring the Exclamations, for want of Trust and Confidence,
and the Unaccountable Jealousies that Follow upon’t. For there are a
sort of People that never consider the many separate Privacies of Trust
and Honour, that a Husband cannot Honestly Communicate to a Wife, nor a
Wife to a Husband: That is to say, where there’s a Third Party or Matter
concern’d, apart from any thing in the Question that is Conjugal betwixt
them.
He that can doubt of the Reason and the Necessity of this Guard and
Caution, must be much a Stranger to the History of the Great Rebellion
under _Charles the First of Blessed Memory_: when so many State-Intrigues
pass’d through the Hands of Women, who are without Dispute the best of
Spies, and the most proper Instruments for Discovery and Intelligence:
Especially if they be Women of Address, Wit and Beauty; for the very Sex
has certain Priviledges upon the point of a Cavalier Gallantry and Good
Breeding, to cover them from the Strictnesses of Search and Examination,
that other Agents are commonly Subjected to.
Now to Reconcile a seeming Contradiction here, in making Women at the
same time to be both Fit and Unfit to be Trusted; this Fable does not
strike so much at the Futility of Women in General, as at the Incontinent
Levity of a Prying Inquisitive Humour; and it falls in over and above, by
way of a Short and Pertinent Digression, to shew that State-Matters are
Morally Excepted out of the Articles of Marriage.