into Australia. Hughes believed that accepting the clause would mean the end of the White Australia policy and wrote: "No Gov't could live for a day in Australia if it tampered with a White Australia." Though UK officials in the British delegation (which Australia was a part of) found the proposal compatible with Britain's stance of nominal equality for all British subjects as a principle for maintaining imperial unity, they ultimately succumbed to pressure from politicians in Britain's dominions, including Hughes, and signalled their opposition to the clause. Though conference chairman, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, was indifferent to the clause, he eventually sided with the British delegation and stipulated that a unilateral requirement of a unanimous vote by the countries in the League of Nations was required for the clause to be included. On 11 April 1919, after protracted and heated debate, a final vote was called; from a quorum of 17, the proposal secured 11 votes in favor, with no delegate from any nation voting no, though there were 6 abstentions, including all 4 from the British and American delegations; it did not pass. France Colonial empire In the late 19th century, French imperialist politicians invoked the Péril jaune (Yellow Peril) in their negative comparisons of France's low birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries. From that racist claim arose an artificial, cultural fear among the French population that immigrant-worker Asians soon would "flood" France, which could be successfully countered only by increased fecundity of French women. Then, France would possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual flood of immigrants from Asia. From that racialist perspective, the French press sided with Imperial Russia during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), by representing the Russians as heroes defending the white race against the Japanese Yellow Peril. In the early 20th century, in 1904, the French journalist René Pinon reported that the Yellow Peril were a cultural, geopolitical, and existential threat to white civilization in the Western world: Despite the claimed Christian idealism of the civilizing mission, from the start of colonization in 1858, the French exploited the natural resources of Vietnam as inexhaustible and the Vietnamese people as beasts of burden. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the First Indochina War (1946–1954) justified recolonization of Vietnam as a defense of the white West against the péril jaune — specifically that the Communist Party of Vietnam were puppets of the