India, Nov. 14 -- On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, the towering sixteenth President of the United States, in his historic Address on the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, in Peoria, Illinois, astutely observed, "Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man's nature - opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow."

Turning the pages of history, the heinous, abhorrent and reprehensible transatlantic slave trade was indisputably the central pillar of Great Britain's economic, political and diplomatic power from the 17th century until the British Parliament passed...