Three broader factors affected the ascendancy of war lords, in addition to obvious motives and interests. The ideological ruin was bad enough; the consequent social disorder crippled China. But the armies now came to provide a refuge for the unemployed and dispossessed. A second factor, the mechanical mobilization of military forces through the railways, made warfare more expensive and ruinous than it would have been with the slow-moving infantry of the past. Thirdly, the war lords gave physical embodiment to the ideological and social disunity of China, inviting the constant intervention of the Western powers and of Japan in Chinese affairs. Individually the war lords warrant no special attention. There was Chang Tso-lin in Manchuria; Tuan Chi-jui and Ts'ao Kun in North China; Yen Hsi-shan ("The Model Governor") and, to the west of him, Fêng Yü-hsiang ("The Christian General"); Chang Chung-chang in Shantung, significant more for his brutality than for his political and military position; the quaint, conservative scholar Wu P'ei-fu, in the Yangtze valley, minor figures in the South and West. It was not the generals who were important, but militarism. Militarism machine-gunned the Confucian ethics out of politics; it taxed the land into ruin; it laid China wide open to imperialistic thrusts, and--by the same act--made her a poor market. Militarism built roads when they were strategically required, established a few railways and spoiled more, modernized China, but did so in the costliest way of all. Only in the intellectual world was military domination not outright destruction. The generals and their staffs were surprisingly ignorant of the power of ideas, ineffectual in their censorship, oblivious to the great leverage of undercover agitation. Trusting arms, they failed to see that the only opposition able to destroy them was not military but mental. While the soldiery stirred the country with murder and oppression, their system progressed steadily toward self-destruction. Two great pressures forced constant further expansion of the armies. The first is obvious: military rivalry. The second was the growing abuse of army organization as a means of unemployment relief. Military taxation drove the peasants off the land, whereupon they had no recourse but to become bandits or soldiers. If they were bandits, consolidation under a chieftain transformed them into military irregulars and induced some ambitious general to include them in his forces. If they were soldiers, the bandit stage remained in reach. In either case, they added to the burden falling upon their commander, which in turn led to still greater impoverishment of the peasants, a further increase of dispossessed men, bandits, and soldiers. With the widening circulation of arms, Western guns and fighting methods became less and less a secret of small groups capable of establishing a firm military oligarchy and more and more the property of a cross section of the Chinese masses.