Certain things, the ocean, the air, rare wild animals, must be the collective property of all mankind and cannot be altogether safe until they are so regarded, and until some concrete body exists to exercise these proprietary rights. Whatever collective control exists must protect these universal properties, the sea from derelicts, the strange shy things of the wild from extermination by the hunter and the foolish collector. The extinction of many beautiful creatures is one of the penalties our world is paying for its sluggishness in developing a collective common rule. And there are many staple things and general needs that now also demand a unified control in the common interests. The raw material of the earth should be for all, not to be monopolised by any acquisitive individual or acquisitive sovereign state, and not to be withheld from exploitation for the general benefit by any chance claims to territorial priority of this or that backward or bargaining person or tribe. In the past, most of these universal concerns have had to be left to the competitive enterprise of profit-seeking individuals because there were as yet no collectivities organised to the pitch of ability needed to develop and control these concerns, but surely nobody in his senses believes that the supply and distribution of staple commodities about the earth by irresponsible persons and companies working entirely for monetary gain, is the best possible method from the point of view of the race as a whole. The land of the earth, all utilisable natural products, have fallen very largely under the rules and usages of personal property because that was the only recognised and practicable form of administrative proprietorship in the past. The development both of extensive proprietary companies and of government departments with economic functions has been a matter of the last few centuries, the development that is to say of communal, more or less impersonal ownership, and it is only through these developments that the idea of organised collectivity of proprietorship has become credible. Even in quite modern state enterprises there is a tendency to recall the rôle of the vigilant, jealous and primitive personal proprietor in the fiction of ownership by His Majesty the King. In Great Britain, for example, George Rex is still dimly supposed to hover over the Postmaster General of his Post Office, approve, disapprove and call him to account. But the Postal Union of the world which steers a registered letter from Chile to Norway or from Ireland to Pekin is almost completely divorced from the convention of an individual owner. It works; it is criticised without awe or malice. Except for the stealing and steaming of letters by the political police of various countries, it works fairly well. And the only force behind it to keep it working well is the conscious common sense of mankind.