By These Words

by Paul Angle. Rand Mc-Nally & Company. 560 pp. $5.95.

In this book Mr. Angle has brought together some 46 of the most stirring and eloquent documents highlighting the long struggle for liberty in America, ranging all the way from the Mayflower Compact, through the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Lincoln’s two inaugural addresses and John Peter Altgeld’s noble protest to Grover Cleveland over the use of Federal troops in the 1894 Pullman strike, to President Eisenhower’s inaugural address. Each document is introduced by a page or two of text recounting the circumstances under which it was produced; and the whole makes an uncommonly valuable collection of some of the great, moving papers that have helped to shape American history.