In the meantime, between 1895 and 1900, changes had taken place in the attitude of the people of California toward the Japanese. For various reasons the friendly feeling of the Californians was gradually replaced by a more or less hostile sentiment. It so happened that just about this time California was the stage for a struggle between organized labor and capital. It was with a great deal of effort and sacrifice that the organized labor of California succeeded in excluding the Chinese coolies. But their hard-won victory was shattered to pieces by the advent of Japanese laborers, whom capital, taking advantage of their ignorance of American customs and language, wisely utilized as a powerful weapon to defeat the unions. To the union men it made no difference whether the strike-breakers were Chinese or Japanese; whether strike-breaking was voluntarily or unwittingly performed; they were enemies just the same. The cry for exclusion was a natural consequence.
Then there also seems to be some truth in the report[7] made in 1908 by W. L. Mackenzie King, the Deputy Minister of the Government of Canada, which states that it is suspected that much of the anti-Japanese agitation in California was deliberately fermented by the interests of the Planters' Association of Honolulu, who, alarmed by the tendency of Japanese laborers engaged on the sugar plantations to seek work on the Pacific Coast of America, where wages were much better, started a campaign to check the exodus by causing ill feeling toward the Japanese along the Pacific Coast. The report states in part:
It is believed ... that the members of the Asiatic Exclusion League in San Francisco were not without contributions from the Association's incidental expense fund, to assist them in an agitation which by excluding Japanese from the mainland would confine that class of labor to the islands, to the greater economic advantage of the members of the Association.[8]
For these two chief reasons, and perhaps for many other minor ones, there arose the persistent social movement for Japanese exclusion in California, which first took definite shape in 1900, when a mass-meeting held at San Francisco for the express purpose of more rigidly excluding the Chinese, adopted a resolution urging Congress to take measures for the total exclusion of Japanese other than members of the Diplomatic Staff. Following this came the first of the anti-Japanese messages delivered by the Governor of California, and of the resolutions voted on by the State Legislature calling upon Congress to extend the Chinese Exclusion Law to other Asiatics. The climax of the movement was reached when, immediately after the earthquake, the Board of Education of San Francisco passed the "separate school order," and Japan protested. A series of diplomatic negotiations followed, which finally resulted in the repeal of the school discriminatory order and the conclusion of the "Gentlemen's Agreement," whereby Japan pledged herself to restrict the number of immigrants to the United States.