If a house was on fire there could be but two parties. One in favor of putting out the fire. Another in favor of the house burning.

Using the image of a burning house, the speaker reduces a complex dispute to a stark moral binary: in an emergency, neutrality and half-measures collapse into complicity. The metaphor implies that some political crises—especially those involving fundamental rights or the survival of a polity—demand decisive action rather than procedural delay or “balance.” In Lincoln’s idiom, such framing typically served to argue that tolerating the spread of a grave wrong (often slavery, in antebellum rhetoric) is not a middle position but a choice that aids its continuation. The line’s force comes from treating the crisis as immediate and self-evident, making opposition appear irrational or morally perverse.