Washington repeats the phrase "one-third” in the eighth paragraph primarily to Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull you against the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, r*t*rding every effort to advance the body politic.