a symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked up
from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a
reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel
has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered
the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for
antiquaries. So little do men really change. They always leave their
temples, whether they lived in Poplar or Nineveh. Only the names of
their gods change. The Chapel at Poplar it was then, when this
shipping parish had no docks, and the nearest church was over the
fields to Stepney. Our vessels then lay in the river. We got our
first dock, that of the West India Merchants, at the beginning of last
century. A little later the East India Dock was built by John Company.
Then another phase began to reshape Dockland. There came a time when
the Americans looked in a fair way, sailing ahead fast with the
wonderful clippers Donald McKay was building at Boston, to show us a
tow rope. The best sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, and
the Thames building yards were working to create the ideal clipper
which should beat them. This really was the last effort of sails, for
steamers were on the seas, and the Americans were actually making
heroic efforts to smother them with canvas. Mr. Green, of Poplar,
worried over those Boston craft, declared we must be first again, and
first we were. But both Boston and Poplar, in their efforts to perfect
an old idea, did not see a crude but conquering notion taking form to
magnify and hasten both commerce and war.

But they were worth doing, those clippers, and worth remembering. They
sail clear into our day as imperishable memories. They still live, for
they did far more than carry merchandise. When an old mariner speaks
of the days of studding sails it is not the precious freight, the real
purpose of his ships, which animates his face. What we always remember