it was a common practice ... that a hundred or more in a company, young and old, would make nightly invasions upon houses of the wealthy to the intent to rob them and that when night was come no man durst adventure to walk in the streets.

Inhabitants of the cities of the present time are inclined to think that crime is common on the streets at night, but what would it be without adequate artificial light?  Two centuries ago in a city like London a smoking grease-lamp, a candle, or a basket of pine knots here and there afforded the only street-lighting, and these were extinguished by eleven o’clock.  Lawlessness was hatched and hidden by darkness, and even the lantern or torch served more to mark the victim than to protect him.  It has been said in describing the conditions of the age of dark streets that everybody signed his will and was prepared for death before he left his home.  By comparison with the present, one is again encouraged to believe that the world grows better.  Doubtless, artificial light projected into the crannies has had something to do with this change.

Adequate street-lighting is really a product of the twentieth century, but throughout the nineteenth century progress was steadily made from the beginning of gas-lighting in 1807.  In preceding centuries crude lighting was employed here and there but not generally by the public authorities.  In the earliest centuries of written history little is said of street-lighting.  In those days man was not so much inclined to improve upon nature, beyond protecting himself from the elements, and he lighted the streets more as a festive outburst than as an economic proposition.  Nevertheless, in the early writings occasionally there are indications that in the centers of advanced civilization some efforts were made to light the streets.

The old Syrian city of Antioch, which in the fourth century of the Christian era contained about four hundred thousand inhabitants, appears to have had lighted streets.  Libanius, who lived in the early years of that century, wrote: 

The light of the sun is succeeded by other lights, which are far superior to the lamps lighted by Egyptians on the festival of Minerva of Sais.  The night with us differs from the day only in the appearance of the light; with regard to labor and employment, everything goes on well.

Although apparently labor was not on a strike, the soldiers caused disturbances, for in another passage he tells of riotous soldiers who

     cut with their swords the ropes from which were suspended the
     lamps that afforded light in the night-time, to show that the
     ornaments of the city ought to give way to them.

Another writer in describing a dispute between two religious adherents of opposed creeds stated that they quarreled “till the streets were lighted” and the crowd of onlookers broke up, but not until they “spat in each other’s face and retired.”  Thus it is seen that artificial light and civilization may advance, even though some human traits remain fundamentally unchanged.