The Toronto Police Were Domestic Missionaries in the Battle for a Christian Moral Society

With the increasing incorporation of municipalities across Upper Canada, the battle for a Christian moral society gradually shifted to elected councils and municipal police forces. Far from giving up the struggle, they gave it new life. Nicholas Rogers describes the Toronto police of the later nineteenth century as 'domestic missionaries' in the cause, adopting moral reform as their 'particular vocation.'

--David Murray, Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791-1849, Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History (2002; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 88.