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