Increasingly as the 19th century went on, the Cossacks served as a mounted para-military police force in all of the various provinces of the vast Russian Empire, covering a territory stretching across Eurasia from what is now modern Poland to the banks of the river Amur that formed the Russian-Chinese border. The police forces of the Russian empire, especially in rural areas, were undermanned owing to the low wages while the officers of the Imperial Russian Army hated having their units deployed to put down domestic unrest, which was viewed as destructive towards morale and possibly a source of mutiny. For the government, deploying Cossacks as a para-military police force was the best solution as the Cossacks were viewed as one of the social groups most loyal to the House of Romanov while their isolation from local populations was felt to make them immune to revolutionary appeals. Traditionally, Cossacks were viewed in Russia as dashing, romantic horsemen with a rebellious and wild aura about them, but their deployment as a mounted police force gave them a "novel" image as a rather violent and thuggish police force fiercely committed to upholding the social order. The Cossacks had been trained as soldiers, not policemen, and the government never provided any police training, resulting in the Cossacks taking an aggressive, militarised approach to policing. This change from an irregular cavalry force that fought against the enemies of Russia such as the Ottoman Empire and France to a mounted police force deployed against the subjects of the empire caused much disquiet within the Cossack Hosts as it was contrary to the heroic ethos of frontier warfare that the Cossacks cherished.