Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.

Asquith’s epigram turns on a familiar paradox: youth is prized for its energy, openness, and physical vigor, yet it is typically paired with inexperience and poor judgment. The line implies that the “ideal state” would combine youthful vitality with the maturity, perspective, and self-knowledge that usually arrive only after years of living. In that sense, it is a wry comment on the human life course—how the qualities we most want rarely coincide at the same moment. The humor also carries a faintly political or statesmanlike undertone: experience is hard-won, but it often comes when one’s powers are already beginning to wane.