Social organizations of national scope or ambition took advantage of the new communication. Trade unions, benevolent associations, and professional societies multiplied their annual congresses and conventions, and increased the proportion of the population that knew something of the whole Union. A few periodicals and pattern-makers began to circulate styles, which clothing manufacturers imitated and local shopkeepers sold at retail. Mail-order business was aided by the same conditions. A new uniformity in appearance began to enter American life, weakening the old localisms in dress, speech, and conduct. Until within a few years it had been possible here and there to sit down to dinner "with a gentleman in the dress of the early century--ruffles, even _bag-wig_ complete"; but the new standards were the standards of the mass, and it became increasingly more difficult to keep up an aristocratic seclusion or a style of life much different from that of the community. With the growth of national uniformity went also the concentration of control. As the field of competition widened, the number of possible winners declined. Men measured strength, not only in their town or State, but across the continent, and the handful of leaders used the facilities of communication as the basis for the further expansion of their industries. Business was extended because it was possible and because it was thought to pay. Many of the economies of consolidation were so obvious as to need no argument. If a single firm could do the business of five,--or fifty--it increased its profit through larger and better plants, greater division of labor, and a more careful use of its by-products. It could cut down expenses by reducing the army of competing salesmen and by lessening the duplication of administrative offices. The same economics in management which had driven the Old South to the large plantation as a type drove American industrial society toward economic consolidation and the trusts. The technical form of organization of the trust was unimportant. Strictly speaking, it was a combination of competing concerns, in which the control of all was vested in a group of trustees for the purpose of uniformity. The name was thus derived, but it spread in popular usage until it was regarded as generally descriptive of any business so large that it affected the course of the whole trade of which it was a part. The logical outcome of the trust was monopoly, and trusts appeared first in those industries in which there existed a predisposition to monopoly, an excessive loss through competition, or a controlling patent or trade secret.