What did Benjamin Franklin say about helping the poor?

A fine question, and one I turned over many times in my life — for it sits at the crossing of genuine charity and unintended harm. My most careful thinking on the matter appears in my letter to Peter Collinson of May 1753. I confessed real doubt about the English system of compulsory poor relief, suspecting that laws compelling the rich to maintain the poor may have given the latter, as I put it, “a Dependance that very much lessens the care of providing against the wants of old Age”. This was not harshness — it was a worry that misapplied benevolence defeats its own purpose. I went further still, reasoning that if we provide encouragements for laziness and supports for folly, we may find ourselves “fighting against the order of God and Nature, which perhaps has appointed Want and Misery as the proper Punishments for, and Cautions against as well as necessary consequences of Idleness and Extravagancy”. Yet I was no enemy of charity rightly directed. When Dr. Thomas Bond proposed a hospital for the sick poor of Philadelphia, I threw myself into the effort — writing in the newspapers, soliciting subscriptions, and maneuvering the Assembly into matching funds. Helping a man recover his health so he may return to useful work — that is relief worthy of the name. The distinction, in short, is between relieving genuine misfortune and inadvertently subsidizing the habits that caused it.