This version could not yet be considered as definitive, since when it came up for the third reading before the Assembly a new version was presented in the form of a new amendment by Löbe, Trimborn and Heile, which modified the original version. The changes proposed dealt with the method of calculating the majorities necessary in a popular vote to determine territorial changes. The Prussian Minister of the Interior Heine complained that the compromise previously adopted after such long debate had been modified at the last moment in the course of conferences to which the representatives of the states concerned had not been summoned. He preferred the original version; nevertheless he accepted the new one since he was convinced that the Constitution would have to be revised in several of its parts. He added several interesting declarations. It would be dangerous, he said, to seek to realize unity within the Reich by creating new states, which would almost immediately after have to abandon their newly won sovereignty and dissolve themselves into the Reich as a whole. That would be a useless detour. Heine pledged himself to facilitate the creation of the state of Thuringia and to give up to it a part of Prussian territory on the condition that prior to this a treaty would be enacted between that state and Prussia regulating the administrative and economic relations between the two. But he opposed with vigor the proposition to create the state of Upper Silesia and above all opposed the creation of a Rhenish Republic. This Republic, he pointed out, would unite the territories of the left bank of the Rhine occupied by the enemy and the territories of the right bank administered by Prussia. Such a union far from safeguarding the German spirit on the left bank would incur the risk of submitting the right bank to the same influences that prevailed on the other, and thus create a considerable danger of infection to the right bank. Finally the Löbe-Trimborn-Heile amendment in its new version was adopted by the Assembly. At the same time the Assembly passed a resolution which invited the Government to institute a central office where the different states would be represented; one which would have as its function to prepare programmes for regrouping the territory in accordance with a general plan. In July, 1920, a commission was formed in the Reichsrat with the consent of the states to devote itself to this task. The Minister of the Interior for the Reich, Koch, summed up its programme as “federation and decentralization.” 2.--CHANGES IN STATE TERRITORIES. The territorial status of states is regulated by Article 18 of the Constitution.