The phrase "blood, toil, tears and sweat" became famous in a speech given by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom on 13 May 1940. The speech is sometimes known by that name. Background This was Churchill's first speech since becoming prime minister. It was made on 13 May 1940 to the House of Commons after having been offered the King's commission the previous Friday, to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the first year of World War II. Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain on 10 May, and in this speech he asked the House to declare its confidence in his Government. The motion passed unanimously. This was the first of three speeches which he gave during the period of the Battle of France, which commenced with the German invasion of the Low Countries on 10 May. History Churchill had used similar phrases earlier, such as "Their sweat, their tears, their blood" in 1931, and "new structures of national life erected upon blood, sweat, and tears". Churchill's sentence, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat," has been called a paraphrase of one uttered on 2 July 1849 by Giuseppe Garibaldi when rallying his revolutionary forces in Rome: "I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death." As a young man, Churchill had considered writing a biography of Garibaldi. The circumstances under which Garibaldi made that speech—with the revolutionary Roman Republic being overwhelmed and Garibaldi needing to maintain the morale of his troops towards a highly hazardous retreat through the Apennine mountains—was in some ways comparable to Britain's situation with France being overwhelmed by the German offensive. Theodore Roosevelt uttered a phrase similar to Churchill's in an address to the United States Naval War College on 2 June 1897, following his appointment as federal Assistant Secretary of the Navy: "Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph."<ref>James A. Billington. 2010. [https://books.google.com/books?id=91IFAYFhtOMC&pg=PA13 Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations] Courier Dover Publications, p. 6.</ref> Churchill's line has been called a "direct quotation" from Roosevelt's speech. Churchill, a man with an American mother and