Professor Gaffney wrote:  
  
>Also, "employer" is one who advances capital, and should not be listed  
separately.  
  
Ripley/Dana or whoever wrote the entry (the article is uncredited)  
presumably meant, by  "merchants" and "employers", the various classes of  
middlemen. Compare a citation from a different 19th-century  
writer (Francis A. Walker,  The Wages Question: A Treatise on Wages and the  
Wages Class, 1888):  
  
"They  [the economists] resolve the entire industrial community into  
capitalists and laborers; and divide the whole product between the two. To  
the contrary, I hold that no theory of the distribution of wealth, in modern  
industry, can be complete which fails to make account of the employing  
class, as distinguished in idea, and largely also in its personnel, from the  
capitalist class".  
  
"This function, then, of the man of business, middleman, undertaker,  
adventurer, entrepreneur, employer, requires to be carefully discriminated".  
  
See http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/YPDBooks/Walker/wlkWQ14.html  
  
Professor Gaffney also wrote:  
  
>Also, "capitalist" is not the same as "capital".  
  
Yes, by modern standards, and even compared to Henry George, Ripley/Dana are  
indeed "careless writers".  
  
By the way, Ripley is George Ripley of Brook Farm.  
  
Yuri Tulupenko