In Geer _v._ Connecticut[957] the Court sustained the right of the State to forbid the shipment beyond its borders of game taken within the State--this on the ground, in part, that a State has an underlying property right to wild things found within its limits, and so is entitled to qualify the right of individual takers thereof to any extent it chooses; and a similar ruling was laid down in a later case as to the prohibition by a State of the transportation out of it of water from its important streams.[958] In Oklahoma _v._ Kansas Natural Gas Co.,[959] however, this doctrine was held inapplicable to the case of natural gas, on the ground: first, that "gas, when reduced to possession, is a commodity, the individual property" of the owner; and secondly, that "the business welfare of the State," is subordinated by the commerce clause to that of the nation as a whole. If the States had the power asserted in the Oklahoma statute, said Justice McKenna, "a singular situation might result. Pennsylvania might keep its coal, the Northwest its timber, the mining States their minerals. And why may not the products of the field be brought within the principle? * * * And yet we have said that 'in matters of foreign and interstate commerce there are no State lines.' In such commerce, instead of the States, a new power appears and a new welfare, a welfare which transcends that of any State. But rather let us say it is constituted of the welfare of all the States and that of each State is made greater by a division of its resources, * * *, with every other State, and those of every other State with it. This was the purpose, as it is the result, of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution of the United States."[960] In Pennsylvania _v._ West Virginia[961] the same doctrine was enforced in disallowance of a West Virginia statute whereby that State sought to require that a preference be accorded local consumers of gas produced within the State. West Virginia's argument that the supply of gas within the State was waning and no longer sufficed for both the local and the interstate markets, and that therefore the statute was a legitimate measure of conservation in the interest of the people of the State, was answered in the words just quoted.