At last, after all the endless reports of meetings to seemingly no end: actual details! As the above -- from the Manchester Guardian (p. 9) -- shows, the Czech autonomy proposals (first reported yesterday) were pretty generous. The Sudetens (and presumably other minorities) would get self-government, language equality, their own civil servants and police. I'm not sure what the 'Protection for citizens against denationalization' means -- more likely something about the right to a passport than maintaining state ownership of industry!
The proposals also include 'Guarantees for the integrity of the frontier and the unity of the State', which seems reasonable enough. But a (later to become infamous) leading article in The Times suggests an alternative (p. 13):
In that case it might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race. In any case the wishes of the population concerned would seem to be a decisively important element in any solution that can hope to be regarded as permanent, and the advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous State might conceivably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German districts of the borderland.
There it is: the first time (at least in my sources) that the idea of the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany -- the solution eventually adopted at Munich -- was raised in the British press. The Times was often thought, somewhat unfairly, to be especially close to the British government, so a suggestion like this will make people sit up and take notice.
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