The next little colony founded in New Zealand dates its birth from 1850.  Though it was to be Otago’s next-door neighbour, it was neither Presbyterian nor Scottish, but English and Episcopalian.  This was the Canterbury settlement.  It owed its existence to an association in which the late Lord Lyttelton was prominent.  As in the case of Otago, this association worked in conjunction with the New Zealand Company, and proposed to administer its lands on the Wakefield system.  Gibbon Wakefield himself (his brother, the Colonel, had died in 1847) laboured untiringly at its foundation, amid troubles which were all the more annoying in that the association was in financial difficulties from its birth.[1] Three pounds an acre was to be the price of land in the Canterbury Block, of which one pound was to go to the church and education, two pounds to be spent on the work of development.  The settlers landed in December, 1850, from four vessels, the immigrants in which have ever since had in their new home the exclusive right to the name of Pilgrims.  The dream of the founders of Canterbury was to transport to the Antipodes a complete section of English society, or, more exactly, of the English Church.  It was to be a slice of England from top to bottom.  At the top were to be an Earl and a Bishop; at the bottom the English labourer, better clothed, better fed, and contented.  Their square, flat city they called Christchurch, and its rectangular streets by the names of the Anglican Bishoprics.  One schismatic of a street called High was alone allowed to cut diagonally across the lines of its clerical neighbours.  But the clear stream of the place, which then ran past flax, koromiko, and glittering toe-toe, and now winds under weeping-willows, the founders spared from any sacerdotal name; it is called Avon.  When wooden cottages and “shedifices” began to dot the bare urban sections far apart, the Pilgrims called their town the City of Magnificent Distances, and cheerfully told you how new-comers from London rode through and out of Christchurch and thereafter innocently inquired whether the town still lay much ahead.  The Canterbury dream seems a little pathetic as well as amusing now, but those who dreamed it were very much in earnest in 1850, and they laid the foundation stones of a fine settlement, though not precisely of the kind they contemplated.  Their affairs for some years were managed by John Robert Godley, a name still well remembered at the War Office, where he afterwards became Under-Secretary.  He had been the life and soul of the Canterbury Association, and as its agent went out to New Zealand, partly in search of health and partly with the honourable ambition to found a colony worthy of England.  He made a strong administrator.  Their Earl and their Bishop soon fled from the hard facts of pioneer life, but the Pilgrims as a rule were made of sterner stuff, and sticking to their task, they soon spread over the yellow, sunny plains, high-terraced mountain valleys, and wind-swept hillsides of their province.  Their territory was better suited than Otago for the first stages of settlement, and for thirty years its progress was remarkable.