The War ~an, 1793-1815 89conservatives, such as Wilberforce, who were uncomfortable with the zea-
lousness of the Vice Society. By 1812, the Vice Society, for all intents and
purposes, was moribund.^37
Loyal Associations, Volunteer Corps, and the Vice Society offered patrio-
tic Englishmen opportunities to fight England's internal enemies. Explicit
connections were made between immorality, crime, and the threat of revolu-
tion. As befitted English conservatives, these men and women used the
tradition of amateurism and the idea that law enforcement was the respons-
ibility of all respectable subjects.^38 However, even patriotic enthusiasm did
not overcome the now familiar shortcomings of voluntarism. Radicalism and
war created a political and emotional climate in which the tradition of
voluntary, amateur law enforcement had its best opportunity for success,
encouraged and blessed by government, buoyed by patriotic enthusiasm. But
the limited usefulness of the Loyalists. Volunteers, and Vice Society agents
as police was evident. Enthusiasm was not a substitute for discipline, as
parish authorities had learned long ago. Watch committees and vestries,
not voluntary associations responding to crises and enthusiasms, had devel-
oped the structures upon which more effective law enforcement was based.
This crisis did, however, bring the central government increasingly into the
issue of the police of the metropolis, a subject near and dear to the heart of
Patrick Colquhoun.
Patrick Colquhoun, a native of Glasgow, was a successful merchant, magis-
trate, and Lord Provost of Glasgow. In 1791, he moved to London, looking
for government employment. He found it in 1792 when he was hired to be a
police magistrate for the Worship Street office, later at Queen's Square until
his retirement in 1818. Colquhoun is best known as the author of a work
entitled A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis: a Detail of the Various
Crimes and Misdemeanours By which Public and Private Property and Security
are, at present, injured and endangered: and Suggesting Remedies for their
Prevention.^39 Colquhoun has been characterized as 'the first major writer
on public order and the machinery of justice to use "police" in a strict sense
closely akin to modem usage'.^40 Colquhoun deserves this for his insistence
that policing, when defined as crime prevention and detection, must be
separate from judicial functions. He also used the word in its modem
sense when he discussed forces of men who performed the functions of
prevention and detection, such as the Thames River Police.^41 But Colqu-
houn's use of the word police was ambiguous. He spoke of a 'General Police'
that had many 'branches' of which the 'Criminal Police' was only one. The
'Criminal Police' included a wide variety of elements - regulation of hawkers,
peddlers, hackney coaches, and other suspicious occupations, establishment