The tasks and future of democracy will be the subject of the Godkin Lectures this year, open to the public without charge, to be given next month by Professor Charles K. Merriam, noted authority on modern government, of the University of Chicago.

Dr. Merriam has been a member of the National Resources Planning Board, President of the Social Science Research Council, and President of the American Political Science Association, and has been Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago since 1911. In addition to being Godkin Lecturer, he will conduct courses as Visiting Lecturer on Government during the second half of the academic year.

The title of his series of Godkin Lectures will be "On the Agenda of Democracy." The lectures will be given December 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, and 13, in the auditorium of Littauer Center of Public Administration at Harvard, at 8 p. m.

The Godkin Lecture Foundation was established in 1908 in memory of Edwin L. Godkin, editor of the New York Evening Post and the Nation magazine, "for the delivery and publication of lectures upon the essentials of free government and the duties of the citizens or upon some part of that subject."

Among the Godkin lecturers in the past have been James Hryes, President Charles William Eliot, Jogef Rexllich, Herbert Croly, Leon Dupriex, Moorfield Story, John Grier Hibben, Alfred Zimmern, Murray Seasongood, Walter Lippmann, Heinrich Bruening, Gunnar Myrdud, and Robert Moses.

Since 1939 the foundation has been administered by the Graduate School of Public Administration, which proposes to conduct the lectureship as a medium for the publication of lectures recognized as embodying some of the best thought in America and abroad on problems of government.

Besides his university work and his services to the national government, Dr. Merriam has entered politics in Chicago, serving as city chairman for six years, running as candidate for mayor, and serving as chairman of the Commission on City Expenditures.

Among Dr. Merriam's many publications in political science are "The New Democracy and the New Despotism," 1939; "Political Power," 1934; "The American Party System," 1922; "American Political Ideas," 1921; and "History of American Political Theories," 1903.

During the World War he was commissioned a Captain in the Aviation Section of the Signal Reserve Corps, and was President of the Aviation Examining Board, and commissioner of the American Committee on Public Information, in Italy in 1918.