In 1899 he joined the United States Army,[1] and travelled to the Philippines and then to China, where he was present during the Boxer Rebellion, before returning to British Columbia in 1901.

[1] Up to the time he entered politics, he was a lay preacher in his local Methodist Church and he occasionally took services in remote logging camps and schoolhouses outside Vancouver.

Vancouver was rife with opium dens, saloons and illegal gambling halls, and Stevens visited these places each night and then published the names of the establishments and what he had witnessed there in the press the next day.

[1] Stevens was an opponent of Asian immigration saying, in 1914, "We cannot hope to preserve the national type if we allow Asiatics to enter Canada in any numbers.

"[citation needed] He was actively involved in the Komagata Maru incident, working with the head immigration officer, Malcolm R. J. Reid, to stop the ship's Indian passengers from coming to shore.

It was Reid's intransigence, supported by Stevens, that led to mistreatment of the passengers on the ship and to prolonging its departure date, which was not resolved until after the intervention of the federal Minister of Agriculture, Martin Burrell, MP for Yale—Cariboo.

Bennett agreed to set up a parliamentary committee in February 1934 to examine price fixing and corporate manipulation of the market.