Here is another instance which illustrates this sense of duty, and desire of atoning for past mistakes or sins. At the time of the overthrow of the feudal system, the samurai, bred to loyalty to their own feudal superiors as their highest duty, found themselves ranged on different sides in the struggle, according to the positions in which their lords placed themselves. At the end of the struggle, those who had followed their daimiōs to the field, in defense of the Shōgunate, found that they had been fighting against the Emperor, the Son of Heaven himself, who had at last emerged from the seclusion of centuries to govern his own empire. Thus the supporters of the Shōgunate, while absolutely loyal to their daimiōs, had been disloyal to the higher power of the Emperor; and had put themselves in the position of traitors to their country. There was a conflict of principles there somewhat similar to that which took place in our Civil War, when, in the South, he who was true to his State became a traitor to his country, and he who was true to his country became a traitor to his State. Two ladies of the finest samurai type had, with absolute loyalty to a lost cause, aided by every means in their power in the defense of the city of Wakamatsu against the victorious forces of the Emperor. They had held on to the bitter end, and had been banished, with others of their family and clan, to a remote province, for some years after the end of the war. In 1877, eleven years after the close of the War of the Restoration, a rebellion broke out in the south which required a considerable expenditure of blood and money for its suppression. When the new war began, these two ladies presented a petition to the government, in which they begged that they might be allowed to make amends for their former position of opposition to the Emperor, by going with the army to the field as hospital nurses. At that time, no lady in Japan had ever gone to the front to nurse the wounded soldiers; but to those two brave women was granted the privilege of making atonement for past disloyalty, by the exercise of the skill and nerve that they had gained in their experience of war against the Emperor, in the nursing of soldiers wounded in his defense.[*223]