The writer's experience shows the need of co-operation between magistrates and alienists. Representations which led to legal investigations were made by the former confederates of an alcoholic woman who was improving rapidly in the sanatorium of Fort-Jaco. The inquiry was conducted in a spirit of antagonism and suspicion which spread discontent among patients. The removal either home or to the asylum was ordered of certain patients well suited to sanatorium care who had not asked to go. These included chronic psychoses without anti-social conduct, paranoias, simple dementias, transitory and curable psychoses, etc. In particular the removal home as mentally fit and wishing to leave was ordered of a blind paraphrenic who made a stereotyped demand for discharge to go to “X, where she had the freedom of the city,” but who remained, though she carried the writer's signed permit, and who refused to depart with her friends. Other cases, unable to exercise volition (e.g., of stupor) were to be certified.