But the tour had its own special disappointment, for there were but few young people amongst the candidates for confirmation. This he attributed to the lack of schools, which he must now try to get the missions to provide. Meanwhile new settlers were constantly arriving. In 1847 a large number of military pensioners had been settled by the Government in the neighbourhood of Auckland. No provision for chaplains or for any religious ministry had been made for them. The Bishop set to work at once and provided each of these settlements with a little wooden church. He himself, and the young deacons working with him, conducted the services in these little churches. They went on foot through mud and mire every Sunday to the different settlements, the Bishop always taking the hardest part of the work and the largest number of services. In the evenings all the clergy and lay readers met together at St. John’s for what was called the “Unity Service,” after being widely scattered for their different duties during the day, and joined with the students from the college, dark-faced islanders, English and Maori boys, in a last act of prayer and praise. In 1850 an important new settlement was made in the Southern Island near Lyttelton. It had been planned in England and was carried out under the auspices of what was called the Canterbury Association, formed in order to send out a band of settlers belonging to the Church of England, accompanied from the first by a number of clergy and teachers, and a prospective Bishop, who came out to view the land before deciding whether he would accept the appointment. Selwyn was very glad to learn that some one was coming who would relieve him of the charge of the Southern Island, but he was not previously consulted as to the Settlement and doubted the wisdom of the arrangements made. He wrote: “My growing unpopularity with the Company for advocating native rights is, I conclude, the reason why a plan like this of the ‘Canterbury Settlement’ is forced on in the same hurried and reckless manner which has caused all former disasters—without a single enquiry of any kind being addressed to the Bishop of the Diocese. If I were a mere land agent, my local knowledge of every part of New Zealand both of the coast line and of the interior, with few exceptions, wherever human beings are settled, might have induced reasonable men to write to me before they pledged themselves to such a partial and profoundly ignorant body as the New Zealand Company. But the Company must sell land or die.... I cannot compromise myself to a recommendation of any site within the Southern Province unless the whole be accurately mapped, and facility given to every purchaser to know exactly what kind of land he is buying.... Wherever the settlements be formed, the actual surface of the country must be taken into account. Let the site of every town, village, school, church, etc., be marked before a single acre is sold.”