Indeed, Californian assertions that Oriental immigration menaces, not merely the coast, but the whole continent, seem well taken. This view was officially indorsed by Mr. Caminetti, Commissioner-General of Immigration, who testified before a Congressional committee some years ago: "Asiatic immigration is a menace to the whole country, and particularly to the Pacific coast. The danger is general. No part of the United States is immune. The Chinese are now spread over the entire country, and the Japanese want to encroach. The Chinese have become so acclimated that they can prosper in any part of our country.... I would have a law to register the Asiatic laborers who come into the country. It is impossible to protect ourselves from persons who come in surreptitiously."[180] Fortunately, the majority of thinking Americans are to-day convinced that Oriental immigration must not be tolerated. Most of our leading men have so expressed themselves. For example, Woodrow Wilson, during his first presidential campaign, declared on May 3, 1912: "In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration, I stand for the national policy of exclusion. The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. Their lower standard of living as laborers will crowd out the white agriculturist and is in other fields a most serious industrial menace. The success of free democratic institutions demands of our people education, intelligence, and patriotism, and the State should protect them against unjust and impossible competition. Remunerative labor is the basis of contentment. Democracy rests on the equality of the citizen. Oriental coolieism will give us another race-problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson."[181] The necessity for rigid Oriental exclusion is nowhere better exemplified than by the alarm felt to-day in California by the extraordinarily high birth-rate of its Japanese residents. There are probably not over 150,000 Japanese in the whole United States, their numbers being kept down by the "Gentlemen's Agreement" entered into by the Japanese and American Governments. But, few though they are, they bring in their women--and these women bring many children into the world. The California Japanese settle in compact agricultural colonies, which so teem with babies that a leading California organ, the Los Angeles _Times_, thus seriously discusses the matter: