Canada's treatment of the Asiatic races lawfully admitted has been marked by leniency. She has extended to the Orientals the privilege of naturalization and of securing homesteads. Even in British Columbia, the center of anti-Oriental agitation, the Japanese and Chinese are permitted to conduct business and cultivate land on an equal basis with British subjects in Canada. They may own land, both urban and rural, and in provinces other than British Columbia they are entitled to voting privileges when naturalized; only in that province the Orientals are not allowed to cast ballots, though free to become citizens. It is reported that there are 13,823 Japanese residing in Canada to-day, engaged in fishing and logging and sawmill industries, as well as in agriculture. South America. For some years past a number (about six thousand) of Japanese immigrants has been sent every year to Brazil in compliance with the request of the Republic. They have been mostly engaged on coffee plantations in Sao Paulo. The colonization is still in an experimental stage, and it is a little premature to forecast its future at this time. Altogether about twenty thousand Japanese immigrants have gone to the South American Republic. The United States. Perhaps attracted by the wonderful stories of the discovery of gold in the Sacramento Valley, or possibly cast ashore in boats on the Pacific Coast of America, there seem to have lived in the early sixties in California about a hundred Japanese. Early California papers record the story of quaint-looking Japanese settlers, who were received with great favor. Although accurate records are lacking, it would seem that the number of Japanese did not begin to increase until the late eighties, when a few hundred began to come in every year. The census of 1890 reported the number of Japanese residents as 2039. From that time on the number of immigrants steadily increased, reaching the highest mark in 1907, when about ten thousand of them entered continental America in one year.[5] The direct incentive for Japanese emigration was furnished by a few large emigration companies,[6] which were formed with a view to supplying contract labor to Hawaii and America, where the demand for labor was insatiable. In the former case, the rapid growth of the sugar plantations demanded a large supply of cheap labor. In the latter case, the need for cheap labor was urgent, due to the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Law in 1882, which soon began to effect a decrease in the number of Chinese laborers, resulting in a dearth of labor on the farms and in railroad work. It was in response to the urgent demand of capitalists and landowners in Hawaii and America for Japanese labor that the emigration companies sprang into existence with the object of facilitating the complex process of immigration.