After these greatest questions there came a series of minor measures to round off the Government’s social policy. The Ministry of Health Bill, introduced in February and passed during the Session, concentrated all the authorities responsible for public health into one great department, which will gradually function as a new centre for the preventive and curative measures suggested by the advance of medical science. The Land Acquisition Act, in spite of the criticism brought to bear on it, is already of immense value in enabling the new housing authorities to acquire land. It is now safe to say that the trouble of the land is the least of the questions involved in the matter of housing. The Land Settlement Act, passed to help place ex-soldiers on the land, quickened and extended the facilities for acquiring land for settlers either on small holdings or allotments. The Extension of Rents Act, passed in March, prolonged to one year after the war the freedom from a rise in rent granted to small householders, and the margin of rents covered by the Act was considerably raised in the course of the debate.[142] The Industrial Courts Act set up an industrial tribunal for the settlement of disputes, and, providing good-will gathers round it, may, in the end, give to us a good working substitute for compulsory arbitration. Towards the end of the Session Parliament passed a bold measure granting yet a further step in the extension of self-government to India, and in one day it generously increased the grants to old age pensioners. Mr. Lloyd George ended the Session by sketching in outline the bases of a new Irish settlement. Not a bad record for a Parliament which has been denounced in all the terms of the political vocabulary as reactionary, illiberal, profiteering, and even corrupt!