Hence the province of government had to be greatly extended. The control of men by the ideology was incomplete wherever the foreign culture had really struck the Chinese—as, for instance, in the case of the newly-developed Chinese proletariat, which could not follow the Confucian precepts in the slums of twentieth-century industry. The family system, the village, and the guild were to the Chinese proletarians mere shadows of a past; they were faced individually with the problems of a foreign social life suddenly interjected into that of the Chinese. True instances of the interpenetration of opposites, they were Chinese from the still existing old society of China suddenly transposed into an industrial world in which the old ideology was of little relevance. If they were to remain Chinese they had to be brought again into the fold of the Chinese ideology; and, meanwhile, instead of being controlled ideologically, they must be controlled by the sharp, clear action of government possessing a monopoly of the power of coercion. The proletarians were not, indeed, the only group of Chinese over whom the old ideology had lost control. There were the overseas Chinese, the new Chinese finance-capitalists, and others who had adjusted their personal lives to the Western world. These had done so incompletely, and needed the action of government to shield them not only from themselves and from one another, but from their precarious position in their relations with the Westerners. Other groups had not completely fallen away from the ideology, but had found major sections of it to be unsuitable to the regulation of their own lives. Virtue could not be found in a family system which was slowly losing its polygynous character and also slowly giving place to a sort of social atomism; the intervention of the machine state was required to serve as a substitute for ideological regulation until such a time as the new ideology should have developed sufficiently to restore relevance to traditions. Indeed, throughout all China, there were few people who were not touched to a greater or less degree by the consequences of the collision of the two intellectual worlds, the nationalistic West and the old Chinese world-society. However much Chinese might desire to continue in their traditional modes of behavior, it was impossible for them to live happy and progressive lives by virtue of having memorized the classics and paid respect to the precepts of tradition, as had their forefathers. In all cases where the old ideas failed, state and law suddenly acquired a new importance—almost overwhelming to some Chinese—as the establishers of the new order of life. Even etiquette was established by decree, in the days of the parliamentary Republic at Peking; the age-old assurance of Chinese dress and manners was suddenly swept away, and the government found itself forced to decree frock-coats.